O World of Many Worlds
by CBK1000
Summary: 10th entry in an ongoing Au Originals series. Klaroline
1. Part One

**A/N: A quick note about the reference to a Killarney farm as Tim's childhood home, because in the New Orleans flashback that takes place in the eighth one-shot, he tells Kol he's from Kerry: Kerry is a county in Ireland, Killarney one of its towns. It's not a slight retconning of his past; he just gave Kol the county rather than town when talking about where he was from. Also, I mentioned this way back in the fourth one-shot, but as I'm sure no one remembers that far back (or at least specific terminology from it), 'peeler' is a term for a police officer. Also, there are a few references to suicide in this one-shot. Just a warning for anyone who finds that sort of thing triggering. I think I've forgotten to warn for that before, since immortals are always getting bored and finding new, creative ways to kill themselves.**

**'You might say Man was born, it may be, in God's image, or Earth, perhaps, so newly separated from the old fire of Heaven, still retained some seed of the celestial force which fashioned Gods out of living clay and running water. All other animals look downward; Man, alone, erect, can raise his face toward Heaven.' This is a (very slightly paraphrased) quote from Rolfe Humphries' translation of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, book one, 'The Creation'.**

**I've borrowed the title from another of Wilfred Owen's poems.**

* * *

So January yields its teeth to a soft February, fuzzy round the edges with sun, and him in his cap and work boots, same as the ones the good Lord birthed him for back in 1891 when his da cast the humble die of his future with that bleak Killarney farm.

He takes them to quite a few heads, these good work boots of leather heel and steel toe.

Kol took the play from his second eldest brother when he vanished for lands unknown, and so it's time for the pussy to quit her batting about of the mouse and get on with its death, which is the only thing saving the taxes which must be got on with, so here and he goes with his cap and his recovering heart along the sidewalks busy with peeler and soldier, gun in his pocket, orders still fresh in his ear.

The newest wolf with his end in a circle on his forehead he finds already fled this mortal plane, stepped off a stool and swung himself to death on a rafter, and so he stands looking up at this heavy pendulum swaying there on the southern breeze finding its way in through a window open on a winter's eve, because why the Christ not, in this soggy desert of a land.

Leapt off his own stool in a barn way out the bunghole end of County Cork, 1920.

Nothing tormented about it, sure and he'd lost his friend who showed him the humor rather than the blight of his new station in life, but you can't be following him off down that river of the Greeks, put you on your back with the stupidity of it, not a third decade under your belt and you've given it up, then, Timothy Patrick O'Sullivan, and anyway, if he's making an honest man of himself he's to admit that he wanted, like all the lads of his age in all the wars of the world, to live. Oh, he wanted to live.

But the boys dropping dead all round him with their British bullets and him like a statue of the king, untouched by it all?

It was just a curiosity, left him deader than that cat with its fatal curiosity, but he came round with some of his own men whispering underneath him, because oh, wasn't it a shame, quiet thing but with a trigger finger like stone, not a bad sort, and maybe and they regretted those underhanded jokes that cut the poor boyo up, you could tell by his face even if he gave his hands something to do with that cap of his he never did take off and he laughed bright as you pleased.

So he hung there with the noose about him, and how lonely it was, to draw this line in the sand, the brave men with death's jaws open to receive them and they plunging in after their freedom all the same, and the men like himself with no consequences for their cause and no arms waiting to bundle them up into God's embrace where he'd soothe all the bumps and scrapes of this imperfect world He filled with his imperfect creatures.

It wasn't a very hard decision to eat them.

Funny how they drew their own lines between themselves and the English who were themselves still supposedly creations of the Lord, declared their very blood and their bones of a different make, and imagine the shock of them, to find it sure as fuck him up the ass tasted all the same.

He wasn't so lonely then, with the men bloating him to the beltline, a piece of them all carried off into the soft April rains.

That little bit of companionship digests quickly, though, and then off with you into your hayloft where you bed down beside another rebel shivering with night and fear, and this loss of a friend weighing on your shoulders and the bullets somewhere off in the distance coming down but never on you, and the rebel beside you in the hay long enough without woman or warmth that he only freezes and then shudders when you press yourself to him, stiff with memory, and you fetch him off almost to completion, and then it's all clumsy desperation at that point, hands on your hips and prick up your ass like the little _queer _you are, you get told shakily when the rebel has wiped off his sin and done up his trousers, and so you push him out of the hayloft and you listen to his neck break, not because he's cast something like that at you, _queer's _just a little pebble in the handful you've got dashed in your face, but rather he didn't kiss your neck or call you something like his 'little Irish cupcake' till you were both sick with laughter-

And there you are, crying in your hayloft, with the bullets still striking all the boys who are not you.

He can't tell you how angry he is, thinking of that wretched man in his hayloft who'd have given anything to have back his friend.

Eejit of the worst order, sending him off like that, and with barely a fucking good-bye, Christ and the goddamn _cowardice _of him.

But it wasn't him what chased off Kol Mikaelson in the first place, his fucking shitstain of a brother managed that all his own, and don't we all know the stupidity of raw rage, so don't judge his brain on this mild gray day of mid-February, when he turns on one of his own team mates, a pivotal lackey of the boss', and he eats him down to the bone.

Three of them he eats, actually.

And snatch one of the military's trucks, _Timmy_, never know when it might come in handy, says the handler of his leash, so indeed he gets his hands on one, and he arranges in the driver's seat the remains of one of these lackeys whose face is now a little worse for the wear, and he crashes the whole fucking lot of them into that bloody _fucking _Hotel Monteleone that started it all.

What a scramble he has to make for the cover-up of it.

Klaus eyes him suspiciously anyway, because there is not much you can put past thousand-year-old eyes, but perhaps he's held his spine straight enough, because he emerges all in one piece.

But he hasn't escaped much unscathed, he finds in the end, for it's little sharp Caroline who is to accompany him on his next outing.

* * *

They're to snatch the peelers' armored personnel carrier on this drizzly afternoon, and as he's not so stupid as his temper tantrum of two days previous would suggest, he sets the two of them up on a cautious stake out, to wait for the garage to empty rather than make their frontal assault on a force that might well be armed with ammunition to kill, directly or no, for if Klaus' girlfriend gets the boot from this life, sure and it'll be his stupid Mick ass following right along behind, and then how to reach that far-away Kerry with his friend and that tomb waiting on him?

She keeps up a steady hum of companionship, this slight little thing. Tried to ignore him at first, he could see her wrestle with the struggle of it, but there's some can't help the chatter, so off and away she goes in his ear, and if he'd thought to pinch a larger car, that'd have been just fucking grand of him.

"Ok, you are seriously creeping me out. You're like Evil Henchman Number Two in The Godfather. You know, the one who just stands there not saying a word, which, he doesn't really need to, because you know he's there to be all…evisceratey, so who needs him to talk, cheesy I-shall-be-your-doom monologues are for straight-to-DVD, but it's still really kind of weird, because this isn't a movie, so could you please say something?"

"Something," he says, adjusting his revolver with a grimace; fucker's got its sights into his hip, and it's not at all the sort of poke a man wants after a streak of loneliness not pacified by his hand.

She eyes him from the front seat where she has lain herself down, curls like a halo round her, and if and it wouldn't unman him, he might admit he nearly swallows his tongue, getting the jab as he does from her gaze.

"It does speak. And it jokes."

Ladies should be neither cursed nor ignored his ma taught him, but the nerves the queer delicate little things set to shaking inside him, which maybe is why he settles for a dick up the ass or in the mouth seven times out of ten, because a man at least he knows somewhat how to broach but a woman is quite another island altogether, and him just paddling round the sea lost in its froth, trying to fumble his way to shore.

Also, he hears tale that on the same night of his own almost successful death sentence, this one was nearly shot to death, and still she ripped a man's testicles clean from round his pecker, and perhaps even ate them with a smile, it's whispered among the shadows, and if the Catholic shade of that old Tim still hovering round inside him thinks he uses his own for all the wrong reasons, still the boy wouldn't wish that on even the man who had to make three attempts at one of those strange underground parties of London's sinners with the men in skirts and corsets before he crossed the threshold and let queers more bold than he undo his trousers and have their go at him, two at a time.

She must be waiting for some kind of rejoinder, of course she must, surrounded as she is by those Original siblings who have a retort for all, and so he squints up from beneath his cap, to the rain pearling on the windows, and he tries to think of something.

But with the shyness like a hole in him and the words slipping about like eels, never a one caught up in his hands, he does as he often will, wets his lips, looks away, and how that bastard ever pries up the wit he can hear in his own head but never bring to his tongue he couldn't tell you.

Sheer superiority, he can hear Kol insist clear as though he puts those words right to his ear, and oh he misses the fucker.

It's worse than the pain of his fingers digging those bullets from lung and heart, for the length of it, and the ache of it, bedding down each night with him when he lays his head in a different spot, because what are men like him to do, but keep uprooting themselves when they have just found their place?

"Kol said something like that once," he says long after it's appropriate to respond, the air thick with the awkwardness of his timing, and she looks back to him once more, letting go the fingernail she has been picking at.

She hesitates for three more full moments. "So, do you…like him?"

Mary and Joseph; sure and he'll just be talking prick preferences while he submits to have his nails done up in cosmetic and gives a solemn listen to the attributes of all the celebrity sweethearts she carries round in her wallet and kisses before her bedtime.

"It's ok. My dad was gay. And if Kol's your thing, then that means Klaus isn't.'

He looks up at the roof of the car.

"Do you think he'll come back?" Caroline asks.

Well, now, a regret isn't really something you can get back, now is it? Whole point of it's the slip of it between your fingers, and the flopping round on the bank before it splashes away into the sea, and you standing round cursing your rod and tackle because there's not a cast fast enough in your supernatural fingers to reel it in again.

But your boyfriend's a poisonous sort, he learned that the hard way, and no pun intended for the implication of that, so if Kol has to pursue his happiness somewhere the other fuckin' side of the world, then it's not just biblical love of a man he's added to his sins he supposes, because though his throat tightens with thought of it, he's not about to begrudge the man his better life though he passed up his place in it.

If he had…if he had a friend who didn't shut up his throat with fear of them, he might tell them this.

But you know, they all tiptoe away, time, friends, the wars with their distractions bursting in the grass.

"I think he's gone."

And the thrust of that in his chest- he couldn't tell you.

The rain starts to really bang away at the windows now, maybe demanding to be let in, it's that angry, but it fills the silence between them, because either she's finally stopped up that motor mouth of hers or the nerves have got her too, for she's trying to take careful little peeks over the wheel and toward the garage, her curls sticking out a little haphazardly from where she has lain on them.

"So are we actually going to do anything, or are we just going to sit here all day?"

And we've felled the blow he's been expecting all along.

He's happened upon the organizational skills of this woman a time or two, with his hat pulled down and his shoulders slunk into himself so he might flee a wrath scares even his Lord Fuckhead, if he's not mistaken, and even a peripheral shot is enough to stagger a man, so to have the full force of it turned upon him- Jesus, Mary and Joseph, he knows he's long flouted your favor, but if you could not keep him from temptation, at least deliver him from evil, for his ma was such a good woman, pious to the bone, God bless her, and himself innocent as the first snow, till the brothers Mikaelson got hold of him.

"Well?"

He wets his lips, and darts his eyes nervously toward her. "We're waiting for the garage to clear out; then we'll sneak our way in."

"Why don't we just go now?"

"Ah, I dunno. Just a feeling in me gut, that they're not going to be keen on just handing over their lorries."

"Ok, look. I don't want to be a bitch here, but we're not friends, and having recently gotten in touch with my burgeoning amorality, I might eat you, because I may be blonde, but sarcasm does not go over my head, and _hello_. We have a little thing called compulsion that says, yes, actually, they will be keen on just handing over their 'lorries' if we want them too."

"And if there's the mechanic and the whole lot of them in there, armed to the fuckin' nuts, you think you can work your way round to all of them before someone opens fire, and some of them probably with their blood full of vervain?" he snaps, and then he realizes his slip, and he rattles off his apology for his language, because if he's a monster it's still no excuse for bad manners.

She sits up. "Do you have a gun?"

"Yeah."

"Give it to me."

"And why would I do that?"

"So that if I'm in the process of eating one person, I can shoot another if they try and rush me, or stake me, or kill me in any other type of manner."

"I don't think so. If you walk in there and get your head shot off, Klaus'll have mine next."

"Ok, but people like me do not just sit around waiting for things to happen. They make plans. They take action. They do not sit in cars with boys who screwed their boyfriends and then tried to come back for seconds while they were already in a relationship, which is a really shitty thing to do, by the way."

"Are you thinking I want another go at him?"

"I'm thinking you've been staring an awful lot at his _penis_, for someone who's not trying to get in it."

"That's not how gay sex works."

"I _meant _for someone not trying to get in his pants, ok? I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. Just give me your gun, and I'll take care of this." She holds out her hand expectantly.

And for some reason his sanity just flees him, maybe it's his grief and the hole it makes in him, hollowing out a place for all manner of things to grow, but the worst of it this anger eating him away like the rains erasing the landmarks of his home, and in no man did heartache birth such great idiocy, for he swings his legs out of the way and he yanks down one of the cushions so that he can reach back into the dark space of the trunk and unearth the shotgun he has stored there.

And then, stupid fucker he is, he shoves it into the hands of this girl who will earn him a very long death, one curl on her head gets carried off with the winging of the bullets sure to fly, and he pushes past her into the driver's seat.

He flips down the visor and catches the keys that drop with a jingle.

"What are you doing?"

He leans across to roll down her window, giving the handle on the door a crank to nearly tear it from its moorings, his jaw tight.

"What are you _doing_?" she demands again, and into the ignition go the keys, touch of the pedal and he revs the engine, shifts the stick into first, jerks the wheel away from the curb to jolt them into the street, scraping the bumper of the Datsun he has snugged himself in behind.

"Oh my _God_!" she shrieks as he short shifts his way up into third and he floors the pedal, aiming the nose of the car for the door of the garage.

Flimsy aluminum thing, the door is, and it crumbles grandly when he hits it, and if her grand Ladyship isn't any first pick of his, she's no idiot, for she flings herself over as there is that sudden chatter of a gun startled into the fight, and then she awkwardly pumps the shotgun in that cramped little space and edges the barrel out the window, to skim a good return shot off the skull of their first assailant.

He brakes abruptly.

Her head puts a star in the windshield.

He opens the door and blurs himself round to the bonnet of the car and its burden of aluminum before she can turn the shotgun on him.

The mechanic gets his wrench to the head.

The officer who unsnaps his holster and draws with shaking hand takes a Long Colt to the throat.

Caroline swings open her own door and crouches behind it as some unseen corner of the garage lets off a long stream of return fire.

He snatches a pipe off the workbench and into the temple of a peeler who gets a lucky shot into his shoulder it goes, all the way through to the other side, the skull yielding like sponge cake, blood spraying, brain spattering, the wet crunch of it a bloody bomb in his ears, Caroline up beside him now, to lend her assistance to him or his attackers, he's not sure, but there she goes, off with those soft hands and sleek hair of hers, and now that unseen corner goes silent as a distant alarm takes up its shriek from within the station.

"Good job!" she snaps.

Must have been a pair lingering somewhere right near the door, because they nudge it open and take the offensive at a crouch, hugging the walls as away with their Glocks up round their ears they go, looking for their shot.

He shoots them both in the head.

"Could you _stop_!"

And certainly the sickness of asylums has got hold of him, because he puts his boot on the throat of the mechanic still gurgling away at life though that wrench gave him a blow to demolish half his face, and he fires another two rounds into his chest.

"Get in the truck. Now," she says coldly.

Into the APC they go, then.

She seats herself at the wheel.

"The fuck are you _doin'_?" he blurts out.

"Well, I thought instead of sitting around waiting to be arrested and possibly murdered by the hoard of SWAT team members you brought down on us instead of letting me sweet talk my way into having the thing just _handed _to us, that we'd be on our way."

"You don't know how to drive this thing!"

"Well, there's a thing here that turns, when I pull on it? And something else, that I can push with my foot? I thought I'd start there," she tells him, and though there's a bit of fumbling round for a moment, something clicks into place, for the thing gives a lurch that flings him across the long cushioned bench on the right.

They shoot backwards across three lanes of traffic, the tires squealing in the damp, horns blaring all around, and him cursing just as his dear departed mother always told him not to round a lady, hanging for his dear undead life onto the back of a seat that takes his nails to the frame.

"Close the back doors, you idiot!"

A blast of wind takes his cap from his head.

Some forgotten rucksack slithers along the floor and tumbles away out the back, into the windshield of a Ferrari that swerves into the backend of an idling Plymouth.

They slew round a corner so hard the momentum shakes him loose from the chair and nearly throws him face first into the opposite seat.

"Do you drive your mother's Lamborghini like this, then?" he snaps, throwing himself into the seat and bracing his boots on the bench across from him.

"Do _not _talk to me like I'm some spoiled little rich brat. My mom is a cop. She works with people like the ones we just killed. She _is _like the people we just killed," she yells over her shoulder, and through one of the little side windows he watches a very red traffic light flash past.

It shuts his mouth on this bravery of the battlefield that for one sweeping moment does away with his awkwardness.

He forgets the youth of her, surrounded as she is by old men and women crumbling in spirit if not in bone.

He was but a lad once, full to his brim with blood and tears and the strange sexuality that suffuses a man once he has joined death and is drawn to every aspect of it, the smell and the sight and the taste of it doing horrible things to his prick aching with the throb of it, and no one to let off the steam but a man even worse than the boy called Tim O'Sullivan, who is neither here nor there anymore, but shut away down deep in a place permanent as the tomb they slid his poor mother into, to wait for that summer emancipation of flesh from bone.

He'll just be keeping his mouth shut for all the ride to the old fort where they are to store the lorry, then.

* * *

Klaus is amused, if anything, at the drama of their escape, although Elijah will so totally probably get his super expensive silk designer whatever boxers up his ass over it, but that's not for her to worry about, he can take that up with Klaus, who surfaces only rarely from this broody asshole mood Kol cemented when he fled for parts unknown, and anyway, like it's _her _fault that Klaus employs total _whack jobs _who kill officers with hair like her mother's.

But she doesn't tell on him.

She doesn't know why, but for some reason she adjusts her story just slightly, she makes her voice just indignant enough to suggest Tim was uppity, she almost ate him, but she can't dig down into the real life-threatening _stupidity _of it because in his voice was this utter bleakness when he spoke of Kol, and she knows the holes from which voices like that are reeled, and how they feel, and the way they never close.

Isn't that something?

That she would spare a man she doesn't even like from Klaus' wrath, because he's in love, because he's hurting with it?

She can hold onto something like that, can't she?

* * *

"And then I was Flower #3 in Johnson Elementary's springtime production of 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'. Flower #2 was just awful, brought the whole cast down, so I ate him. Little bastard won't be missing his cue to shimmy his stalk round to stage _right _again, I can assure you that."

The witch seated across from him blinks just a little.

He blinks back, pleasant smile still in place.

"We're going to need some kind of assurance that you won't just turn right around and stab us in the back as soon as you leave here. Your kind's not exactly trustworthy."

"Well, that's a little racist, don't you think? How would you like it if I said that I needed some kind of assurance that you wouldn't make me commute to work on a broom and tarnish my stunning fashion sense with one of those pointy hats you people are always donning?"

"We're not just going to blindly trust you."

"You know, I came out to have a good time, and I am honestly feeling so attacked right now."

She stares blankly at him.

"Well, someone hasn't been keeping up on their internet memes."

"Yeah, I've been busy, trying to keep my sisters and I hidden from your brother," she snaps.

Speaking of.

He broadens his smile. "I can give you the names of Nik's most important players, and where you can be sure to find them. Is that enough to satisfy you, or did you want something else you may have cast your eye on and can't be faulted for coveting?"

* * *

Klaus is out more often than not, getting his hands dirty, Rebekah tells her, so, fine, if he wants to murder away his pain, the two of them are just going to sit here and be a couple of girls, which is so totally never something she thought she'd undertake with _Rebekah Mikaelson _of all people, but she does a mean winged eyeliner, and she has all these utterly fabulous impressions of her brothers she whips out when she is just a little tipsy with the bourbon they steal from the stash Klaus thinks he has cleverly hidden under his bed, and on nights when the house is devoid of boys, they're actually quite idiotic, dancing around to Icona Pop once a little of that stolen bourbon oils some of the head bitch snob from Rebekah's joints, the furniture a little worse the wear for their drunken antics, one of Elijah's favorite couches picking up a hole the size of her fist, courtesy of an enthusiastic heel, and so they giggle their way through a cushion flip that Rebekah points out Elijah will spot in a moment, and then they break into one of the locked rooms that turns out is some weirdo shrine to all these antique pocket watches, Nik has them all arranged alphabetically, by victim name, Rebekah explains in that so-much-posher-than-you accent of hers, and opens one of the cases.

"Let's piss him off!" she declares way too loudly, pumping her fist in the air.

"Would you shut your mouth? He's going to hear you halfway across the city, you twit."

"Sorry!" she screams, and then she giggles like it's the funniest thing she's ever said, and Rebekah gives her two of the watches to stuff down her bra and scoops another few into her hand, and down slams the lid, shivering the remaining watches in their velvet perches.

"I feel like I have these, like…wonder robot boobs."

"What in the hell are you talking about, Caroline?"

"Ok, so one of them has slid down my bra right over my nipple, right? Like, I don't know- it's some kind of futuristic robot gun thingy that _no one _would ever see coming, because boobs are supposed to be good. Pew pew," she mimes, aiming her left breast at Rebekah.

There is this moment of silence, and then suddenly Rebekah leans her hands onto her knees and lets loose with a laugh that sends tears just freaking _gushing _down her cheeks.

* * *

Klaus is a quick one, give the man a candy, because just two days later he storms into the living room where she and Rebekah are arguing over Jennifer Lawrence's Oscar dress and leans his shoulder against the wall, both his eyebrows raised, little bitch face firmly in place.

"I'm missing an 1897 Elgin, a 1917 Hamilton, a 1927 Hampden, and two Waltham's, an 1860 and an 1895. Care to tell me where they might, perhaps, have walked themselves off to? _Rebekah_?"

"Pew pew," Caroline says, and they both begin to cry with their own wit.

He throws up his hands. "Perhaps another thousand years will illuminate the mystery that is women," he snaps, and vanishes up the stairs to his studio.

"Why do men always hang the top half of their underwear out their pants? Like I want to know if you're wearing laundry day granny's or I'm-getting-laid silk, unless I make it absolutely explicit that I want to see which it is, by taking off your pants."

"It's because Nik's got a behind like a carrot stick. Nothing to hold them up."

"He does have kind of a flat butt."

"Yeah, he's always been like that. Kol's got the bum, Elijah the legs, Nik the propensity for whining that some women might mistake for sensitivity. Together they're the perfect man."

Somewhere in the house, a door slams.

Rebekah smiles. "Want to hear about the time he tried to break his first horse and got a kick to the testicles, right in front of the girl he fancied?"

"Obviously."

* * *

If Time and all its trenches with the boys sunk helplessly in their young graves rolls itself tirelessly onward with no shifting of the backdrop, one must lend the scenery a touch of their own polish now and again.

The youngest Salvatore would of course color it with a bit of that moony woe that is the affliction of heroes everywhere, the chains of the centuries, the dragging of the lusts, we bear our sins as Atlas carried the heavens, etc. etc., but you can't approach it like that, mate.

What sort of name does a man make for himself like that?

So here you shall find him, where live all things consigned to the shadows, wearing February's sharp darkness as a king shoulders his mantle, one leg slung over his chair, head tilted casually back against the rest, hand dangling carelessly across the arm.

You might say Man was born, it may be, in God's image, or Earth, perhaps, so newly separated from the old fire of Heaven, still retained some seed of the celestial force which fashioned Gods out of living clay and running water. All other animals look downward; Man, alone, erect, can raise his face toward Heaven.

But there is none whose face is warmed so closely by these cinders of the civilizations of deities than he who has plummeted from their depths and risen again with his broken wings in ashy smudges round the blades.

You'll forgive him the effrontery.

But if God is to take no hand in these proceedings of years and yearnings, then is it not the task of the monster, this union of animal and man, the one with his gaze to the muck, the other with his eyes kept skinned for the clouds, to straddle his throne of divinity?

Shouldn't have left the children behind to break and to be in turn broken by the things they do not understand, now should you have, mate?

For instance.

The crunching of faraway tires on this winter bed of gravel and ice.

Take those.

Just lend them your ear for a quick moment.

What you hear amidst this swishing of rubber and the pops of these small rocks, bits of ice, unfortunate house pets with their senses not so attuned as his, is the very small keening of what has never been anything other than a very small thing among those great co-conspirators of Time and Death.

Man is not so very unlike his beastly inferiors after all.

But he has evolved beyond this rude union of living clay and running water, and so like a god he waits for them who will take always to bended knee before Creations of his might, and he smiles.

These faraway tires make their transference from pavement to grass, and he keeps his chin down, tapping his fingers along the hand-carved arm.

Tim marches her mute and hobbling along the passageway of mingled dirt and snow to where he sits in the center chamber, and the boy tosses her down before this- he won't venture the conceit of labeling it a 'throne', but if, perhaps, you would go so far…? -chair in which he slouches, like the offering she is.

She is red to her throat with the blood from her mouth.

He deepens his dimples. "My apologies for the bit of rough and tumble, love. Can't have you throwing round spells, though, can we? That wouldn't be safe for my friend here. Tim," he says jovially, not lifting his eyes from the woman. "You did bring an alternative to verbal interrogation, I hope?"

The lad tosses him a notepad and pen.

He catches them one-handed. "Thank you. You're dismissed."

He waits until the woman stops crying and the tires have reversed themselves back onto the pavement.

"Now, sweetheart." He leans forward with his hands laced patiently on the notepad. "I understand you're in a lot of pain at the moment," he tells her sympathetically. "So I want you to just do the best you can, give me information as best you can, foggy though it may be."

She wipes her eyes.

Such a useless thing, these little rivulets of grief meant to stir mercy in the hearts of predators.

But, there, there; he's not heartless, you know.

Bit withered round the edges, perhaps.

"My brother Kol. Where is he?"

He passes her the notepad.

She flips the cover shakily and scratches out a trembly answer.

**I HAVE NO IDEA. **

"But he's here. That's what I'm driving at, love. He's here, and at least one of you is working with him."

** WE'RE NOT.**

He loses the smile.

"Come now. Your attacks on my people have increased exponentially in the last few weeks. You know precisely where and who to strike. In fact, just recently, a terribly tragic nightclub fire took ten of them together. My brother's a bit of a fire bug, you know. I'm sure you do. You're telling me that, having slunk round the city with your tail between your legs for the past month, you've suddenly gained yourselves a foothold with no outside help?"

**WE DON'T WORK WITH VAMPIRES. YOUR BROTHER ISN'T WITH US.**

"That's three times you've lied to my face," he says calmly, and breaks her left elbow.

Interesting, the screams of a mute.

Horrible gurgling sound.

Might be a nice recording to soothe him off to his dreams. Sleep is often a bit of a slippery thing, with so much meandering round in his skull. Not but an eye flutter away from your black peace when up pops Sherrington's findings on split brain phenomena, and off you go with recent representationalist theories on the symbolisms of the brain's little wanderings.

"Let's try that again. Kol is lurking where, precisely?"

**HE'S NOT I SWEAR TO GOD PLEASE HE'S NOT WITH US I CAN'T HELP YOU PLEASE**

"So you're saying he's just gone."

But he doesn't _accept _that.

He watched his brother smolder for three _days_ and he wasn't even allowed a touch of his hair as he got to at least stroke poor Henrik's death-soaked locks, and he can't- he hasn't-

You don't understand.

He can't have just left.

He has failed his family in every which way it is possible to disappoint those who always take your letdowns hardest, with every stroke of which love is capable, but Kol- he-

He just-

He bore it differently.

Everything slid away, because how else was this youngest surviving Mikaelson to live outside the circle he had to chalk round his less tolerant siblings, for whose love he always had to strive, noble Elijah, royal Rebekah, always with that thin bit of _something _between them that Kol never did put up, Kol who in 1102 told him, "It's all right, Nik" when he was still wallowing rather than reveling, and slung his arm round his shoulders and asked with that hint of a smile in his voice whether he ought not to braid his hair and send him round to the village boys to see who preferred his ladies bristly, and if history occasionally carried them off in different directions, he to the New World, Kol at a brisk trot for Africa, always they met up at some confluence of century and country full of smiles and stories.

For a thousand years he has finished what Mother started, and dashed himself to ruin against the love of anything that threatens to hold steady.

"That's unfortunate for you, sweetheart," he says tonelessly.

She tries to gather her feet beneath her, to breathe her exertion in gusty red, to break for the faraway opening that will carry her onto the lawn of the fort where the imprint of Damon Salvatore's broken corpse is not long smoothed over by time.

He lets her struggle up off a knee, scrape together both of her boots, take to her heels in this soggy mud with the color stolen from it by winter, fighting her all the way, one of her shoes left behind in the morass, her heart just frantically going, poor frightened little thing.

He stands.

He crushes the notepad into the mud when he swings that casually arranged leg down from the chair arm.

He takes up no more than a brisk walk, hardly a thing to get the wind up in even the lungs of the young human Niklaus, trading off blows with the stick he took to arms against his young apprentice with dirt all over that little dimple in his chin, until the end of that bout he of course didn't throw, having lost fair and square to his superior opponent, and he must bend over with his hands to his knees, and the sweltering summer in his nose, everything gone thin in his throat, his conqueror swinging from his neck.

You didn't know him.

The either of them, really.

But the elder though he lost touch with everything else carried at least his love into his new life, and then time, neuroses, whatever the bloody _hell _is wrong with him, it didn't take it from him, you can't have lost it, when you're fair choked on the whole bloody mess of it, but certainly it seems that way to the boy who once fancied him a God, as are all big brothers who sit up scaring away monsters.

He slams the witch's head into one of the walls, and watches that strange transference of insides to outsides, very like a painting or two he has done in his time, with its splatters taken from all over the palette.

So you just left him, brother?

There isn't-

There isn't one last bit of forgiveness to be scooped up from anywhere?

Please?

* * *

He takes his lighter to his fag, and shakes the sting from his hand where the flame's taken just a nip from it.

Makes the hair on his fuckin' arms stand up, it does, to listen to Klaus give himself over to fond memories of his Spanish Inquisition days, or whatever it is has taught him to pull the screams from a man like that.

There's the bit of cherry at the end of his fag and not much else this night, with the moon hidden away as she is, and the fog like those wisps of the fey folk he used to watch from the sanctuary of Yeats' dusty old volumes.

Touch wood it isn't him next for those medieval instruments he watched the boss take out with a relish as they cornered some new young thing from Marcel's dwindling numbers.

Caught more than a look or two passed his way, and that smile once would have meant a long night in the sheets, but it's not his prick Klaus is sizing up with that long look of his, it's his throat he's already got his hands round in his mind's eye, you can practically see the fuckin' reflection of it, you can, the fucker's a right goddamn nutter, steeped as he is in his grief.

He puts his hands in his pockets and tongues the fag nervously from one cheek to the other.

Put the poor fuckin' thing down and be done with it, nothing to be got from drawing it out, but of course he doesn't say that, think he's just going to offer himself for the noose like that, better to dust off old Mrs. McClary puttering on away down the damp Sligo roads with her pram and its perpetually enraged pug with the bonnet snug round its ears or one of the boys from the university, right, weren't they a bunch-

Fuck him for a fuckin' shithead and a caffler, stab the fucker through the heart and be god bloody fucking _done _with it.

Not his soft heart shivering in pity, so and it's clear.

Enough Catholic left in him to know a lie for a sin and to offer it up in confession. In the interest of unburdening his immortal soul, for all the good it'll do him, let the record show that one Timothy Patrick O'Sullivan once ate his way out of an awkward social situation (three pairs of eyes on him and not a beer to his name, tried a joke, bungled it worse than that one little faux pas where he thought the Reverend Colm was hinting round the unsavory part of the 'friendship' between man and man, had his belt half undone before the significance set into them both; ate him too), and twice in one Sunday did he take the Lord's name in vain while on his knees in front of Father Blake, who was in fact talking about a different wick when he suggested the lighting of the votive stand.

It's just the goddamned _sound _of it.

Puts a man's shoulders up to his ears.

He pulls nervously away at his fag, flicks the ash of it into the grass.

Going to bring the whole lot of the peelers and the soldiers down on them.

Not that his Royal Shitbag has put a thought to that, he's sure.

Time for a change of the nappy, is it, you whingeing fucker? Oughtn't to have chased your brother out like the shitstain on the trousers of this world you are, maybe, do you perhaps think?

Not that he's bitter or anything.

Oh, no, plenty content he is, having just got the man back and all and now him off and away somewhere in the world plying his charms on some Russian ballerina or Chinese copper.

Not jealous either.

He flicks another bit of ash into the grass.

Fuck whoever he likes.

Maybe fall for a few of them, because whatever he wants the world to believe, nothing dead inside about him, can't doubt his capacity for a moment, when you see that smile, not that bit of frill and froth he uses as a sort of wallpaper, but the real one, with the eyes in on the game and everything.

"Perk up, Timmy," Klaus says suddenly in his ear, and he startles and drops his fag in the grass and smudges it out with the toe of his boot, swallowing the knot from his throat.

Klaus claps him on the shoulder. "Consider yourself dismissed for the night. Take yourself out somewhere nice. Pick yourself up something handsome." He leans in close, smiling. "Make sure he's got that little cleft in the chin. You wouldn't want some nice, smooth little thing ruining the illusion."

And fuck yourself sideways over a table without so much as a gob of spit.

* * *

He is away at his murder five days out of seven, and on the sixth Caroline steps into his room as he bends over his sketchpad, hands behind her back.

"Ooh- brooding artist. Original."

He flicks a little look up at her, his charcoal pausing for only a moment. "Not in the mood, love."

She takes a step forward anyway, because apparently in her presence it's always himself he's nattering away at, never would any of it, perhaps, be directed at her, so he sets down his charcoal with a sigh and folds his hands with a mockingly attentive lift of his eyebrow. "Do you need my help with something, Caroline?"

"I brought someone for you."

"Blonde or brunette? Or a redhead, perhaps? Got to get a bit of variety into the diet."

"Well, unless you want to eat Stefan, I suggest you keep it in your mouth."

"So you've dragged Stefan round to roust me from-"

"Your hermit hole? Yes."

He spreads his hands. "I'd hardly label it a 'hole', love."

"Well, whatever you want to call it, you're moping in it, and I'm tired of it. I just spent like an hour and three mocha lattes on talking Stefan around to coming over with me, so come downstairs and be boyfriends with him, because he's lonely and still heartbroken, and you're lonely and still heartbroken, and this is like the opening to every romance movie ever, where the protagonists make their way all broken into one another's arms and emerge totally healed by the power of love and the side of cheese with their dialogue."

He drops his head and starts to laugh.

"I know. I'm really funny." She flashes across the room to grasp him by the wrist. "Come on."

"I'd prefer to be alone, for the moment."

"Nope, no- not gonna' happen. You're going to come downstairs, and you and Rebekah and Stefan and me are all gonna' get so drunk that Elijah throws out his back, he winces so hard at what complete and total asses we are making of ourselves."

He pulls his wrist out of her hand, but his smile is not unkind.

She lets out a frustrated breath and crosses her arms. "Klaus."

"Caroline." His smile turns just a bit genuine at the look she gives him.

She cocks her hip out to one side and plants a hand on it. "Kol's gone, and that sucks, and I know you're hurt, but you are just going to have to wait for him to forgive you, and next time, you have to do better. You have to give people a reason not to leave. Love is not unconditional, ok? It shouldn't be. There are conditions. You have to treat people like _people_. Like people you love. You can't bribe them, or threaten them, or…hold the people they care about over their heads like bargaining chips."

"Then how do I get them to stay at all?" he asks, directing the question to his hands.

"But then that's obligation, not love. Is that what you want? Is that the only reason you want them staying?"

"I just want them to stay," he says, and he didn't mean it to leak out of him with quite so much rawness.

He looks up at her.

She sighs but her hand is very gentle as she takes it to his curls and she runs it back through them, and acquainted as he is with time and all its limitations and parameters and strange little illusions, still he thinks to himself that somewhere there must be some great trick of a God he doesn't believe in that can stall this moment just a bit.

"Well, you're not going to sit here feeling sorry for yourself because you're a jerk," she tells him, and he lets her pull him to his feet.

She thunders down the stairs at such a pace she nearly dislodges his arm from its socket, tugging as she does on his wrist, and from Stefan he only gets a helpless lift of the hands and from Bekah a dismissive eye roll, and then the girls set to work fiddling away at the iPod docking station Kol nicked from some store or another, the little device still in its slot.

"Oh my God, he has Beyoncé's 'Single Ladies' on here?" Caroline blurts out.

"Yes; he had a whole dance made up to it. You missed that particular Mikaelson family trauma," Rebekah replies, handing a bottle of bourbon to Stefan and another to him. "Hold these. _Don't _drink them yet."

"Do you remember the dance?"

"Let's just leave it, shall we, Caroline?" he puts in, uncorking his bottle and tossing back a nice swig though the look his sister cuts him is enough to wither a lesser man where he stands.

He takes another drink without looking away from her.

"What Nik means is Kol compelled himself several back-up dancers, then while they were flailing around in the background, he hopped up on Nik's back and started slapping his behind like he was some sort of pony, whilst yelling, "Ain't no other man, so if you liked it then you shoulda' put a ring on it!" at the top of his lungs. And here's Nik trying to fling him off, because of course Kol's ruining his image in front of these back-up dancers Kol specifically compelled to _not _forget the most powerful man in the world being ridden across his living room like a common stock horse, and in the end Nik had to break his legs, because Kol had his arms flung out to either side for the finale and his legs round Nik's waist, singing his stupid head off, so then even despite that he's still sort of flapping there, and the back-up dancers are still going, and Elijah walks in and then just walks straight back out. Nik had to eat all the back-up dancers."

"Wait- he opened with 'ain't no other man'? You don't _cross-pollinate _Christina Aguilera with Beyoncé! That is a complete insult. To Christina, I mean."

"I know, right? The audacity of comparing one electronically-enhanced, Hollywood-generated smokescreen who will always depend upon the gnat whims of the lowest common denominator to another," he points out, and takes another drink.

"Shut up, snob. Besides, Christina Aguilera can actually sing. Have you ever even heard her live?"

"Yes, love. I often troll the pits of common pop artists. The mass thwarting of a thousand bedtimes really streamlines the difficulty of a quick grab-and-go."

That one at least gets a laugh out of Stefan, though for his undeniable wit or the affronted look on Caroline's face, he won't venture a guess, though he does lean heavily to the former, for who doesn't appreciate the turn of a good phrase now and again, even at the expense of maintaining one's heroic gloom?

He doesn't want to brag, of course, but there are some men just too funny to resist.

After all.

Punsters deserve to be drawn and quoted.

He opens his mouth to share this bit of brilliance, smiling already to himself and giving a quick look to Stefan, who if not exactly turned toward him, neither has he shifted away, and Caroline points sternly at him.

"_No_."

"What? I didn't say anything."

"He was about to tell a pun," she explains to Stefan, who has leaned forward with his hands clasped between his knees and both eyebrows lifted.

"You can't possibly know that, Caroline."

"Oh my God, I can practically _smell _them on you."

"It's true," Bekah puts in. "You can always tell by the look on his face."

"Yeah; it's kind of this maniacal, twisted combination of 'I'm so creepily enamored of myself you should probably turn away because I'm about to have a moment' and 'God I am so funny and brilliant and just everything here are my feet you may lick them now'."

"So, just his regular face then?" Stefan asks.

"No; there's a subtle difference in the depth of his dimples," Rebekah replies, and jabs him in the cheek.

He makes a face up at her, and always the sweetest smile before the sharpest poke, his sister, and so he should well have anticipated some bit of violence from perhaps the most easily-riled of them all, but still her backhand carries him off the arm of the couch and into the crouch he nearly doesn't land, bottle unharmed in his hand. "What the _hell _was that for?" he roars.

"That's for chasing off my brother."

He puts himself nose to nose with her. "Well isn't that a bit rich, Bekah, coming from you. Your relationship with Kol was of course so seamless that surely his leaving without you was only some oversight on his part, isn't that right?"

"I'm not the one who welcomed him back from the dead by showing him that he better not love anyone but me, or else. I'd like to stick your head in the toilet right now. And hold it there till your feet stop kicking," she spits, and grabs him by the hair.

"Maybe if you psychos just talked your issues out once in a while, instead of murdering one another into temporary compliance, you'd get a lot farther with each other."

"Nobody asked for your input, Caroline!" Rebekah snaps, giving his head a yank to uproot his scalp.

"Let go of me."

"Make me, Nik."

"Oh my _God_, would you both _stop_? You're a _thousand_. _Each_. That's two thousand years of experience between the two of you, and I just think that maybe, somewhere in all of that, you can probably conjure up some kind of solution that doesn't involve pulling hair and blowing raspberries."

"Actually, it's about one thousand and nine hundred years or so, between the two of us, if we exclude that little stretch of time where my own dear, sweet brother stuffed me in a coffin and left me to rot for decades."

"I think it's about time we got over that, don't you?"

"Let me work through it myself, Nik," she says cheerfully, and gives him such a jerk he drops his bottle.

Stefan catches it deftly, and puts his feet up on the table before him.

"Get your feet down, Salvatore. We don't conduct ourselves like _peasants _in this house. Except Nik."

He snaps off the heel of her right shoe with a blinding dart of his boot.

She bends down to remove the other, still clutching him to the roots, and twice she spikes him in the temple with this little javelin, then once more for good measure, he supposes, bloody Salvatore drinking casually, Caroline scowling at them both, and now Bekah twists his arm behind his back and puts him face first into the cushion of Elijah's pristine leather arm chair, the one he's quite fussily particular about, and he feels her knee press itself down with force enough to crack his spine. "Say you're a tit. And you're sorry. And also that I look pretty today."

"And me too," Caroline calls out.

He throws her off.

She gets hold of his hair again, bites his hand, elbows a hairline fracture through his collarbone, and when at last he has her arms bound up behind her, she whips her head back right into his nose, and sends up a plume of blood that paints her hair to the crown.

He just stands for a moment, wrestling his anger back under control, because Kol's absence is quite enough a jab, Rebekah's flight will surely do him in.

Bekah dusts her hands when he releases her.

Caroline taps her heels together just a bit awkwardly, just for a moment, and then she punctures this silence she never could quite stand. "Ok, does anyone want to, like, get a snack or something? Because I don't know about you guys, but I'm really hungry, and there's that really great new-"

"Go find Kol, you ass."

"He doesn't want to be found."

"Like that's ever stopped you before, Nik. In fact, I always thought it was just that much more an impetus for you. The more they want to stray, the tighter he winds his leash."

"Perhaps I've learned a thing or two, in the last century," he says bitterly, and mopping up the last of this fountain coloring him to the chin, he blurs back up the stairs to his room.

* * *

Of course he still looks for him, in every face he dissects.

A family like them- they do not merely pass unnoticed into the roil and toil of time, there is nothing unremarkable about these footsteps they sculpt the earth to fit, they will never fade away as so many fall to their nameless white epigraphs.

So of course his brother left impression on some pliable young thing who turned round to watch him pass.

Of course his brother did not put up his hands and wash them clean of ten black lifetimes he let besmirch but never drown him.

Of course there is somewhere in this city a trail of bread crumbs he pretended not to leave.

Of course he fled a very long way, to put between tormentor and tormented the crumbling mold of a thousand bygone eras, to find again what it means to breathe the recycled lives of European ants, to stretch his legs and to throw out his arms as neither Death nor brother would allow him.

Of course.

And, of course, he's coming back.

Isn't he?

Well, mate.

If you haven't an answer to that, of what use are you?

He slits the throat of the werewolf who lies leaking beneath him, tears, snot, blood, the whole lot of him with the tap left open, Tim silently off to the side where he belongs, good lad, and the February air in through his coat like a knife.

He tips his head to one side, watching this last gurgling claw for life. "Why was the werewolf arrested in the butcher's shop?" he asks tonelessly.

"What?"

Kol'd have got that.

Going to have to be faster on the draw, Timmy.

He takes the boy by the throat and slams him down beside this unfortunate man with his bowels slackened for the final journey, pinning him on his back. "Why was the werewolf arrested in the butcher's shop?"

He tries to make himself so small, poor boy, flattening himself into the grass, breath rattling in his throat.

"I don't know."

"Come now, Timothy, give it a guess."

He touches Tim's cheek gently with the back of his finger. Not so soft as Caroline's of course, he's nothing for a razor to turn tail at but still there's a bit of scruff spattered about among all the blood, prickliest he's ever seen him, in fact, melancholy got your shaving kit, mate?

He smiles. "I don't think he's coming back for you. Do you?"

He just breathes, the stiff little thing.

"He won't come back. Not for someone like you. Who he left behind. Who one day he will forget all about. You're a very inconsequential thing. You always have been, Timothy."

He strokes the back of his finger one more time across the slope of the boy's cheek, very gently, and then he punches his hand down into the very meat of him, all the way to his heart.

He was getting tired of him anyway.

* * *

Father Kinney's lopsided smile finds him in the back pew, and then he's after snuffing the candles, and devoted he is to the particular task, never a man so given to his chore, which might be on account of last month's communion of robe and flame, as passionate a coupling as ever he did see in all his years, but that's an edge of gossip to it, so he'll just be leaving off with the tidbit about the scandalized parishioner who rushed to the saving of the poor man just a second too late, and found out the hard way about an old man's bits and bobs, which must be left free to air the age from them, as once was explained to him.

Stripped off his whole feckin' robe and stood beating it on the altar, with poor Mrs. Bengley's eyes out farther than her breasts.

And him laughing in the back pew till he nearly put his lunch all over the bench, but begging his pardon, Father, didn't even notice your plight, it was just his reading, you see, Mr. Dickens conspiring to make the ass out of him with this very unfortunate confluence of wit and troubles.

It's the least of his sins, sitting here with _David Copperfield _open on his knees and his smile bent to the pages, so the poor old fucker won't recognize in it the jaunty little replay of his Jimmy, as one of the IRA boys used to call it, flapping itself about with more energy than it'd probably seen in, oh, must surely be a good hundred years or so.

If God's waiting round to put the lightning bolt to him it won't be so petty a thing as this what puts the final nail in his damnation, so he gives his shoulders over to the shakes for a good couple of minutes.

You might guess he's here to bow his head to the miracle that surely is that last second letting up on his heart, Klaus in him to the elbow and no reason to be otherwise, with his brother gone and a city at his bidding, but let go he did, and left him in that grass with the moonlight and blood in peppermint stripes over a dead man's shit, and his own heart still rattling somehow in his chest.

But actually he comes here three days of the week with some novel or other in his hand, Dickens being a favorite but Hugo with a foothold in his heart nearly as firm, and you wouldn't need the authority of some cheap-inked degree out the back of a van to gather it's the convergence of right side up boyo with the Mass memorialized in his heart and the remnants still right side up, if his friend's any expert in which part of a man ought to be sticking up.

Well and either way he spent quite some time on his knees in this church.

He's pretty sure it still counts.

If he's to find his peace in the memories of some long dusty affair that just so happened to feature a front like his own, it's not for any judgment his ma always said was going to strike him down someday, he didn't chew with his mouth closed.

Didn't create him, but didn't stop the creation of him, either.

Can't turn Your back and then spin round to shake Your finger when it's suiting Your own prejudice.

So anyway.

He thanks You if You'd anything to do with that little reprieve Klaus granted him yesterday.

But he's thinking You're probably gone.

Most things are.

Oh, he could shake his fist at it.

He could point out, he _prayed_, you bastard, and then he could bar the doors and seal himself inside with news of his friend's death and the teeming of the dozen or so lost souls groping about for their forgiveness, and he could take particular delight in screaming himself hoarse over their bleating, were any of them thinking He was going to tip so much as a divine eye to their fates, then, shriek yourselves blue in the fuckin' faces, _he's not listening_, don't you _understand_-

But he's not so young as that anymore.

So Father Kinney finishes the killing off of the candles and slinks back away into wherever it is old men like him sprout from, giving him a wave, and he puts his feet up on the pew in front of him and settles into Davey's miserable little childhood, and ah, well, poor fecker, don't give it a thought, the old man will be dust before you know it, and when the electric lights go the way of that one lingering invention of caveman, he reads on with eyes that aren't bothered a bit.

Dickens could have molded a fair bit from this, the faithless boy with the century-old heart and the twenty-one-year-old cheeks, pulling his friends from his books.

Can't get away from you, those ones.

Always rifle yourself back to a place where they're alive, and happy, and they didn't end, and they never will.

All the readers in all the world, whiling away their loneliness at the end of some other fucker's pen.

And this some other fucker bleeding it down to the nib, and watching it soak away into the margins, and thinking to his poor old self, let him have touched some transatlantic soul in his foreign bed, let all the goddamned soot and stink of him be relieved in this strange companionship of traded isolations.

And him and the other faithless of the far and wide Godless planet, wondering why He chooses not to look.

* * *

She is walking alone along one nearly-empty street somewhere over by Bourbon, when suddenly she is just lifted up off her feet, and jerked roughly back into the shadows.

But you know _what_,last time this ended in two mutilated testicles she likes to think all the king's testicle donors and all the king's surgeons couldn't have possibly put back together again, so she's just going to go for broke, and by that she means your penis.

She kicks her foot up behind her, driving the heel along inseam toward groin, and another rough jerk puts enough space between them to spoil her aim, and then back again she is pressed against a chest that she is so totally going to _shred_, just as soon as she gets free.

"Ah, ah, ah," someone says in her ear, and two arms slip around her own, pinning them to her sides. "I heard that story. Did you really eat them afterward?"

"_What_?"

"That man's testicles. The story goes you ripped them off and then ate them, but I feel like that last is the little embellishment that rumor always does pick up somewhere along the way."

"Why don't you let me go so you can find out?"

The arms tighten around her. "I will if you can guess who I am."

"Ok, well, let's see. There's just that right edge of entitled, affected _ass _in your voice, so I smell a Mikaelson." She rolls her eyes. "Also, I recognize your voice. Kol."

The arms loosen and she is spun gently about by the shoulders, until Kol Mikaelson brings them face to face, his hair tousled, stubble a little thicker than last she saw him, smile just as eternally douchey as his big brother's.

"If you're back, then march straight home, and, I don't know, beat, murder, _whatever_, your way back into each other's black and shriveled hearts."

He crosses his arms and leans his hip against the wall at his back. "You're very bossy, for someone all alone with a man who was single-handedly responsible for the downfall of the Knights Templar, and who has plenty of reason to do something just terrible to Nik's favorite plaything."

"First of all, not Klaus' 'plaything', and if that's what he's calling me behind my back, I will take him by the _nostrils _and-"

"Relax, darling. My phrase, not Nik's."

"Fine. _Any_way, you're not here to eat me, so let's just drop the vague threats and get to the part where you put something gross in Klaus' shoes, or whatever worldly, experienced, sophisticated people do when they're working out their differences in a way befitting totally mature, really old-ass adults."

"I sense a bit of sarcasm, darling."

"Klaus and Rebekah settled their last fight by pulling each other's hair and biting one another."

He scrunches up his nose a little. "Mostly Bekah, I'm guessing. She likes to pull Nik round by his hair when he gets uppity. Did she put him in the toilet?"

"She threatened to."

"Well, he got off lightly, then. He tends to do that," he says, and there is a jagged edge of bitterness in his voice for just a moment before he smoothes it back over with his way too freakily-focused smile. "Anyway, you're right- I'm not here to eat you. I have a trade to make."

"A trade."

"I know what my brothers are up to. Nik's being a megalomaniacal prick; Elijah's keeping him in line. Sort of. Well, the illusion's nice for him, anyway." He wets his lips, and looks away for just a moment. "But I was wondering if you could just…tell me what my sister's doing with herself."

It hurts to watch him smile his way through this. "We had a bit of a spat before I died. I think she's used up her forgiveness for me. I did stretch it a very long ways, after all."

"Why don't you just…talk to them?"

He runs a hand down his chin, and clears his throat. "That's not how things work in our family, darling. Anyway, if you keep me up-to-date on whatever domestic dramas are afoot in the Mikaelson clan, in exchange for both your information and your silence, I'll tell you nine hundred years worth of embarrassing stories about Nik."

She crosses her arms. "Give me an example."

"Once in Vatican City, Nik and I were having this priest at the same time-"

"Ok, no. I don't want to hear about how creepily comfortable the two of you are with one another. I really just do not want to know what all you've…put in where, or who, especially if, like, maybe you got curious one time and you were bored and you figured you've done a lot of really bad stuff, so it's not like some Caligula/Drusilla relationship was really so much worse-"

"It wasn't like that, darling. I was sucking his cock while Nik was-"

"Still don't want to know!" she yells, bringing a hand to her forehead. "Sometimes people practice this thing called restraint? It's really great."

"Anyway, so I was sucking his cock while Nik was slipping him a-"

"Yes! Yes, I will tell you every little thing they spend each insignificant moment of their day doing, down to the brand of _toothpaste _they are using, in exchange for nothing, if you just stop. If you stop now, right now, and don't finish that sentence."

"Well, I just feel like that's a little unfair. This is supposed to be a quid pro quo, darling."

"I'll live," she assures him, unfolding her arms to slip both hands into her pockets, her huff going white against the sky.

"I've still got all that horrible erotic poetry Nik wrote when he was a teenager."

She cocks her head. "How bad is it?"

He smiles.

He looks just as young as he is supposed to be, when it reaches his eyes. "Have you ever read _Fifty Shades of Grey_?"

"Yes."

"She's Tolstoy, in comparison. And not the watered-down, lost-in-translation version foisted off on anyone who doesn't speak Russian. The original Tolstoy, in all his glory."

She knows he can see her wavering, because his smile broadens, and when there's no hint of threat in it, just the slightly overgrown bangs falling a little into his eyes, and the two front teeth overlapping just a bit, and the long soft lashes she could just kill to have, it's actually seriously sort of adorable.

She could tuck him in on the couch and brush the bangs from his eyes and bring him warm milk the way Daddy sometimes did, in those days Before, and if anyone ventures so much as a kind of mean look in just the vaguest direction toward him, well, you heard what she said about all the king's testicle donors and all the king's surgeons.

"Deal," she says.

"Excellent."

"I assume you'll be in touch? I mean, I like to think I have some experience with stalkers, and they usually just pop up whenever I least want them."

"Then that's when you'll see me," he tells her, still smiling.

"Ok," she replies, and it's hard not to return it.

She is almost to the opening of the alleyway into which he dragged her when he calls after her. "Caroline."

She turns with one eyebrow lifted, and the smile is completely gone, and there's nothing he can think to do with his hands, because he's got them in his pockets and then out of them, his heartbeat just freaking deafening in her ears, the scent of his nerves nearly as overwhelming.

"Is Tim still alive? I…heard the witches hit some of Nik's people hard the other day."

She lets out just the softest of smiles. "He's alive. Why don't you go talk to him at least? I think he'd probably like that."

There is a visible easing in his shoulders. "I can't do that. I'm not exactly on Nik's side anymore. Can't get Tim caught up in that. He didn't want to be."

"Well, why don't you ask him? Maybe he's changed his mind."

He flashes right up into her personal space, and lifts her hand to his mouth, smile carefully back in place. "Until I can 'spill my musky pearls in your honor' once more, Caroline," he says, and then he is gone.

* * *

Five days later some unknown number rouses her from the stack of files she has immersed herself in for the past three hours, and setting down her wine and snatching up her phone, eyes still to the page in her hand, she barks distractedly into the speaker.

"Hello?"

"Nod once if you're alone."

"I won't even bother asking how you got my number; like I said, I'm pretty well versed in stalkers. And if you can see me, why do you need to ask me if I'm alone?"

"You're right; I'm not actually peeping at the moment. So it's entirely fair for me to guess what you're wearing right now."

"Ok, just because Klaus isn't here, it doesn't mean you can hit on me."

"You're right, darling. That would be immoral. So, what are you wearing?"

"I thought you were going to guess."

"It's probably better for your delicate sensibilities if you just tell me."

"Rebekah spent most of today bringing you into every conversation in the bitchiest way she could possibly manage, which means she misses you; Klaus got really pissed at us both because we pointed out that his fly was open while he was quoting Ovid in his speech to his latest line-up of minions- it wasn't, we just wanted to ruin his mojo; and Elijah took off his suit jacket, his tie, _and _his shoes just to murder one guy who got uppity and tried to hit Rebekah."

"Yeah, he doesn't like splash-back. Apparently it's just awful to try and dry clean it out. I wouldn't know."

"Oh, and your boyfriend is nuts, by the way. Did you know that?"

"It's most of the reason I slept with him. That, and he has no gag reflex."

She rolls her eyes and sets aside the paper in her hand. "Gross."

"Was it him behind the fire at the Bourbon Orleans?"

"Well, not entirely, but he was the only one who made it out alive."

"He's actually quite wily. I like to think he picked that up from me. Like one of those sexually transmitted diseases, only without weeping members."

"_Gross_!" she snaps again, flopping back in her chair with one hand in her curls.

"And speaking of weeping members, your payment: 'For there was no maiden so fair, she made me weep from my pair; yet to your face, I set my pace, until I burst with a moan like a bear'."

She is still laughing five minutes after he has hung up and Klaus has let himself in smelling of blood and snow, Tim beside him stomping the winter from his boots, both of them giving her a look that squeezes the tears that much harder from her eyes.

"What's so funny, love?"

She sniffles and takes up the file open across the arm of her chair. "Nothing. I was just thinking about…bears. And…their pairs."

Klaus tilts his head.

"Sweetheart, how much have you had to drink?"

* * *

On one particularly shitty Monday he and two of Klaus' newest boys raid one of the lorries, the street a fuckin' rink beneath his feet, the gray sky with her baleful fucking eye of a storm cloud waiting to pass judgment on them all.

"Don't use your gun, you fookin' gom!" he hisses at the blonde one might have been called Troy or Trev or Constantinople. Something like that. "You'll bring the rest of them right down on top of us!"

"The hell's a 'gom'?" the blonde asks the other, and with a pinch of his bridge, Lord deliver him from the eejits and the fuckers, he rips open the door of the lorry, yanks the soldier from his seat, opens his head against the window, throws him down onto the sleet, and now on the other side of the truck the boys do the same to the driver, except of course with the guns he just told the little _shites _not to use, the rounds echoing in the street.

The back opens.

He takes a bullet from the rifle edges its nose through the doors, shoulder spouting with the hit, and now round the front of the lorry he goes, onto the bonnet, the roof, slithering on his belly over this thin sheet of iced-over metal, burning the fucking bejaysus out of his bloody gut where his shirt has ridden up, a whole fecking storm opening its throat with a roar underneath him, and the boys who knows where, dead if God never abandoned him after all.

He shoots his hand down over the roof, snatches the helmet of the next soldier down and out of the back, pulls until the neck tendons give way and the head comes loose in his hand.

He draws his revolver.

He shoots the one aiming at him from the street through the head.

Three more of them scrambling round inside, each with their own little giveaways, the rabbits of their hearts and that thunderstorm _whish whish whish _of the breathing and one of them with shit in his pants, reeking of the sewer.

He slithers himself over the one with the shitty trousers, and punches his hand down through the roof.

The serrated edges of the hole he has opened take care of the lad's scream and his head.

The others make a break for it, and round the sides of the lorry come the boys, blonde Troy or Trev or Fergus with his fangs already out and into the throat of the first of them, so down onto the second he drops, the man's gun scattering rounds into the air, his bladder leaking terror out the ends of his trousers.

"Take their guns, their ammunition, and any grenades you find."

They blink the bloodlust from their eyes.

"Can you handle that, then?" he snaps.

* * *

"'In your orbs, I search for morbs; for there is so little, it must be a riddle; but if my torpid snake, shall never again take, the salty tears of your dew, then I shall take the cue; and nevermore, will we couple with a roar'."

"Ok, seriously 'morbs' is not a word!"

"Nik has this thing about rhyming."

"Also, who the _hell _is he having sex with, that there's all this roaring and bear moaning and whatever? Oh my God, please don't tell me bestiality was, like, a thing back then."

"No worries, darling. Just some poorly-chosen descriptions."

"Ok, so, which do you think was the worst one he ever wrote?"

"No, no, no, darling- I'm not just giving that away. That's classified. If you want it, you have to tell me which knickers Tim's wearing today."

"I'm not looking at his _underwear!_"

"Just a peek."

"_No_."

"Do you think he's wearing any?"

"How in the _hell _should I know?"

"Just ask him. 'Timothy, would you say you're free, you're free ballin'!"

"You did not just _pervert _Tom Petty!"

"Go on and ask him, darling. Just like that. But record his reaction on your phone, and then send it to me. I'm going to auction it off at this charity that provides blankets to the poor."

"Right. I think it's called 'youtube'."

"I see you're a real philanthropist, just like me. I think we have a lot in common, actually. For instance, do you remember that one time I was sucking a priest's cock while Nik was-"

"_Stop trying to tell me that story_!"

"My silence in exchange for a picture of Tim's ass."

"Shh, shut up! Today Klaus and Elijah debated some old Greek philosopher for like three hours and I think the end result was that they each think the other one is stupid and wrong, and Rebekah and I ate this total creepo _jerk face _who tried to roofie her and I hear Klaus coming so okay bye!"

* * *

"I really need to talk with Mr. Jacobs," he tells the poor fucker's wife with all the earnestness of this face Ma used to tell him got put on by the angels.

She lets him straight in, course the husband would be happy to see him, just remember their daughter is sleeping, up all last night with a fever, little Meg and her teddy bear, so he makes an orphan of this little Meg with the teddy bear quietly, and he steps back out into the world red to the elbow, wondering does he at least get a nod for the girl still intact in her bed.

* * *

She parts the curtains on the first cubicle of the dressing room and up go her whole freaking _armful _of clothes, her throat just barely stalling on her scream.

"Hello," Kol says.

"This is the girl's dressing room!" she hisses. "Where I am about to be _naked_!"

"I'm perfectly all right with that."

"Get _out_! Besides, I thought this was supposed to be a _clandestine _thing!"

"It is. I checked to make sure no one was watching. Bekah's not with you today. Neither is Stefan. Nik won't come, because he's tired of picking wrong every time you ask him which material best suits your ass." He taps the end of her nose. "It's that sort of stretchy denim, by the way."

"Get _out_, you creep!"

"Once I pantsed Nik in front of the Queen of England. Bekah reports that he just stood there for a moment with his dignity and his trousers both in a puddle; I don't know. I ran very fast. Your turn, darling."

"Get _out_."

"I believe what you meant was, 'Nik can hardly function without you; Bekah is so despondent she only changes her toe nail polish twice a day now; and Elijah has become so scatterbrained in his grief that yesterday he actually left the house with a smudge on his cuff link. Also, Tim will never meet another man as virile and has been ruined for the sweatier sex for life'."

She yanks him into the hall by the collar of his shirt.

"I like a little manhandling, darling. Now tell me how bad I've been."

"_Leave_," she snaps, and jerks the curtains closed.

His hand slips in under the curtain. "Did you want the lacey white ones first, or the black ones? I think the white might wash you out a bit with your coloring, darling, although black might be just a little dark. Also, are they really charging you thirty dollars for this?" He snaps the band of the thong he is holding. "You should probably eat them for that."

* * *

He doesn't think it's a thing to be alone for, the killing.

Supposes he isn't, for the whole of it, with his arms round the man like he might cradle a lover and the struggle of it grinding the man's ass back into his cock so that he's the blood up in more than just his cheeks with their fat black veins.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, maybe he draws it out.

Nips almost like he might have played round with the neck of his friend, curls his hands round the hard points of the hips, throws in a bit more lip than teeth, and the man just squirming, squirming away against him, till all the wriggle's gone out of him.

So he's a fair bit worked up, by the time he makes his unsteady way back to his hotel.

Used to be they'd kiss in between drinks, and he'd feel his way down Kol's trousers while his friend tilted his head back to just savor the taste of his last bite, the both of them breathing raggedly into one another's mouths, Kol nipping playfully at his chin, and the fucking _smile _of him.

Just push it on out the door without yourself, fucker.

And he was offering.

He was _offering_.

You can guess how many heads he's even lifted, slogging his way as he does through awkwardness and years, and men understanding least of all the creatures with the tongues same as their own that it's chosen for them to save rather than wag.

But that man, be all right.

Charming little shit, he thinks, and cries alone in his shower with the tap cranked to fuckin' Antarctica.

* * *

"So why aren't you seeing Nik much lately?" Kol asks her one night as she is lounging in her hotel room, Stefan out on a blood bag run, phone to her ear, nail brush to her big toe.

"Why are you pestering me for obscene pictures of some guy I don't even like, let alone want to spy on in the shower instead of just, I don't know, stopping by his hotel like, "Hey, guess what, still in town, play a round of Seven Minutes In Heaven'?"

"It wouldn't be just seven minutes, darling. Also, you don't have to like someone to want to see them naked. I'm sure you had Nik pretty well mapped out in your head long before you were friends."

"Well, I don't want to see _Tim _naked."

"You didn't answer my question."

She dips the brush, slicks a tentative stripe down the right edge of her nail. "You didn't answer mine."

"I went first."

"Klaus is all caught up in being broody and murdery and he's hardly ever around the house anymore, and when he is, he's kind of creepily quiet, and I don't know how to bring him out of it. I know you think he doesn't care, and I don't blame you for thinking that, but he does. A lot. He just has this extremely weird, asshat way of showing it, but I feel like…I feel like maybe he's finally coming to terms with something. With how he has to act just a little bit less jerky, if he wants anyone to ever stay with him. So, if that's what's happening, and he needs to work it out himself, then I will just give him some space, and just concentrate on bringing Stefan out of his Elena funk." She switches the phone to her other ear. "Why am I always surrounded by moody men?"

"Maybe you ought to keep better company."

"Present company excluded, I'm guessing." She smirks into the phone, and tucks her tongue into the corner of her mouth as she edges another cautious stripe along the center of her nail. "Your turn."

"I already told you, Tim doesn't need to be caught up in any of this."

"Well, he's a big boy, isn't he?"

"Yes, he is, actually. Very big. And not one of those annoying ones with nothing but length, and the girth of a bloody pencil-"

"Ok, no penis talk. I'm putting a prohibition on penis talk."

"We can talk about Nik's, too. It's not like I don't know what it looks like. Cold, sweaty, mid-coitus- there just aren't any surprises left anymore, darling."

"And again with that complete and utter obliteration of boundaries- is that what happens after a thousand years? Ten centuries from now, am I going to walk in on Rebekah while she's, like, mid-orgy, and just stand there recounting what Angelina Jolie's trillion greats granddaughter wore to the twelve millionth oscars?"

"Or you might be participating in the orgy with her. Sexual identity gets a bit fuzzy after a few centuries."

She dips the brush once more, moves on to her next toe. "So, you weren't gay, a thousand years ago?"

"I'm not gay now. I'm all-inclusive."

She moves her tongue a little higher, babying the brush around the cuticle, careful, careful, _careful_- aaaand…danger zone cleared. "Is Tim gay?"

"Tim's had both. He's just more inclined toward men."

"So, do you, like, go through a phase? Like, for forty years, you're really gay, and then for the next forty, it's all hetero, all the time? Or is it just, like, whatever you pull out of the hat?"

"Sometimes you're in the mood for one over the other. Sometimes you have both at the same time."

"So…did you and Tim ever do that?"

She can hear him fighting the smile out of his voice. "I thought you didn't want to talk about my sex life, darling?"

"I don't want to talk about your sex life with _Klaus_. So whatever, whoever the two of you did at the same time, whether you crossed swords or not, I don't want to know."

"We didn't have sex with anyone else while we were together."

"So…do you love him?"

He pauses for just a moment. "Next question."

"Ok…do you have strong feelings of devotion and tingly stuff going on in the special region aimed in his general direction?"

"Why don't we talk about your 'special region' now, darling?"

"Bye!" she sings out, and hits 'end call'.

* * *

A murder and a meal and back to the church with him, Dickens in tow, banged up round the edges, the old man, been through a lot, he has, though none so much as the antique toting him round through the wars and the years.

He wonders sometimes, is it just him feels the years in his bones?

They press away at his eyelids, too, off to the Big Sleep with you, Timothy, had your stretch, outlived the best, and isn't as though in the next hundred, two hundred, thousand years man will have changed, and stopped making war on himself or put to bed his old hates rather than handing them off to the next generation, seen everything this great human mess has to offer, and most of it barely lifting its shoe to glance at you anyway.

Ah, no, he won't be sticking this revolver in his mouth and blowing the lid clean off him.

Tried that too.

He woke up with his gun and his blood in his lap and thereabouts in his skull a faint mention of the pain, and then he just went out into the sun had its nose poking out from behind a cloud for once and sat for a while with the old retriever didn't like him much till he started leaving out the bowls with the leftover scraps of his own meals, the conniving fecker.

What else to do, when you have died and woken up anyway?

He strokes the edge of _Bleak House _with his thumb.

So we tell the stories to keep us alive, we tell the stories to brand our words and all the messy insides of us into the compliant brains of all the readers all the world over, but what for a man who will have nothing but this timeless cycle of paper friends and naught else?

But, ah, then.

Gets in a right fuckin' mood, sometimes, he does.

Dust himself off sooner or later.

Think of something his grand old fucker of a friend would have said.

Fuck it, Timothy.

Literally, darling.

Solution to all life's ails and ills, according to the horny little shit.

* * *

"'And in the light of morn, I feel myself torn; your engorged petals so close, where I miss them most. For they are not yet but far, but somehow they are'."

"Do you think there's a way for me to subtly sneak these into conversations, so that he doesn't _know _I know, but there's that little hint of oh-my-God-what-if-she's-so-smart-and-powerful-and-pretty-she's-literally-absorbing-them-from-my-mind paranoia? I like to watch him sweat a little."

"I'm sure you do."

"You don't have to turn everything into a sexual innuendo."

"Pretty sure I do."

"I have to go. I'll call you later tonight."

"I'll hold my breath till I hear the sound of your voice again."

"You do that. Someone'll appreciate it."

"Yes he will."

"Gross."

* * *

"You!" Caroline barks at him one afternoon when he swings by to see if Klaus has anything for him, and he freezes against the wall, wondering can he make a bolt for the door before she's got him by the boys- by fecking God, she looks pissed-

"Hold this!" she demands, and heaps into his arms a stack of some frill and flutter that slithers round his biceps, paper tassels swinging with the momentum of her throw. "And if Rebekah asks, you moved them."

"What?"

"It's Elijah's birthday, and she wanted to do something for it, only she's doing it all wrong, so I'm fixing it for her." She takes the pencil she's got tucked behind her ear and marks off something on the clipboard she's carrying. "They were in your way or whatever. It's fine; you're not here that often anyway. Just stay away for a few days until she's cooled down. But she already got pissed at me this morning for something that was not even my fault, and I just don't want to listen to anything else, so you moved them, I didn't see anything, they're better off where they are now anyway, ok?"

She makes another mark on her board.

"Uh, actually, I was-"

"Shhjt! I'm thinking!" she snaps, holding up a hand. "How tall are you?"

"6'3"," he blurts out, shifting the whole mess in his arms.

"Great. If you stand on Elijah's chair, the leather one right over there? You'll be just tall enough to reach the corner where she should have hung them in the first place."

"I think Klaus probably has something for me to do-"

"Did I _stutter_?"

No, ma'am, he didn't hear anything of the like.

Should he-

Is it a salute or a click of the heels or a tip of the hat she's expecting of him?

"_Move_!"

Well, that settles that then, he supposes, and gets the chair underneath him and the first of the streamers properly looped in a single breath.

* * *

"I know it's going to be a lie…but can you tell me that Bonnie was happy?" she whispers into her phone one night, and she curls herself more tightly into the sheets where Klaus' scent lingers but he does not.

Kol pauses for a very long time.

He clears his throat. "Of course she was, darling. She had me, didn't she?"

* * *

Nice night.

He forgets about those sometimes.

Just the moon on your shoulders, and the touch of dampness like that eternal wet smog of Ireland.

He flashes round behind the fucker's been following him for a good two blocks, sinks his teeth into the fattest vein, shoots the friend that comes at him from the side.

He pulls back, wiping his mouth.

His bullet found the kid's eye, and has left him incomprehensible but still with the one good eye blinking, blinking, so he squats while he waits for it to finish, taking out his packet of fags and tapping one into his hand.

Death hasn't anywhere to go, lad.

Got to just bend over and take him, you know?

Ah, but the poor fucker.

Just rolling his one good eye round and round, breathing like something beached, lying in his own mess of indignity, maybe thinking with his poor scrambled brain of his wife or the little baby asleep in his warm contentment of unknowing.

Well, go on and figure him for a softy.

He presses the muzzle of his revolver between the kid's eyes, and fires the finishing round, fag dangling unlit from the corner of his mouth.

He licks the thin trickle of blood that seeps out of the wound, and squints up into the sky.

Yeah.

The moon's a real beauty tonight, she is.

Coming up slowly in all her gentle glory, with the bright and merciful face of Heaven shining gratefully upon her, as Mr. Dickens would say.

* * *

"At the alley down just past the Monteleone, where fate first intertwined our star-crossed paths."

"Ok, well, one, it wasn't the first place. Two, stop talking like we're playing the Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt to Klaus' Jennifer Aniston. I have Klaus, and you are doing the exact opposite of 'no homo' with Tim."

"Come on, darling. Come and meet me. Is Nik going to be home tonight?"

She gives one last quick peek to all the carefully-arranged tabs of the folders and closes the drawer of the filing cabinet with her hip. "Probably not."

"Then come out into the world and play. A small town girl like you- I bet you've never been to a drag show, let alone a vampire drag show?"

"No, and what's the difference?"

"Come and see."

"Ok, is there going to be some massive blood orgy or something, because I don't need to go back to my hotel stinking of sex and blood. Stefan is sort of on and off the bandwagon as it is, and I don't think that's going to be helpful."

"Well, I'd take you to one of Emma Johnson's sex circuses, but those went out ages ago, unfortunately."

"_What_?"

"One of the madams of a brothel that was part of New Orleans' red light district used to run these 'sex circuses', back in the day. All the sexual acts you could want, hetero or homo, men dressed like ponies, sex toys you've never even seen before, trapeze acts to put the Cirque du Soleil to shame. Lots of nudity. Also, once I saw the smallest cock I've ever seen there, which was sort of interesting, in a P.T. Barnum kind of way."

She coughs back her laugh, and with the phone cradled between shoulder and cheek, she makes her way over to Klaus' desk, shifting one hip back against it and leaning her weight into the edge, careful to keep herself free of the papers she has fastidiously tidied in the center. "Ok, fine; I'll come meet you. But no sex circuses!"

"What about the drag show?"

"Maybe."

"I can't let you go till you say yes to something scandalous. The blonde hair and big baby blues just scream for me to corrupt them."

"I am not exactly Mary Poppins, you know. Sometimes I eat people, Kol."

"But not nearly often enough, my little Honey Sprinkles."

"Where the _hell _did you get that?"

"From a 'My Little Pony' random name generator on the internet. I get bored," he says, and she hears the smile in his voice as she bursts out with this laugh she can no longer smother.

"All right; I'll see you in twenty minutes," she says, and hangs up.

She turns.

In the doorway is Tim with his hands in his pockets, and a startled shriek and three minor heart attacks and she presses one hand to her forehead, because where exactly in the holy freaking _hell _did he come from, and on what sort of little creepy Casper tiptoes does he tread, because she didn't hear even one single freaking _peep _from those trillion-old stairs, sighing their burdens into nights she would very much appreciate sleeping through, if it's not too much trouble.

"Oh my _God_, you're like a freaking _cat_! You scared me."

"Can you tell me where he is? Please?" he asks, his throat working around these ragged, ragged questions.

"I actually am not sure exactly what you're talking about, but I have somewhere to be, so…if you don't mind." She makes a shooing motion at him.

"I just heard you fucking talkin' to him!" he snaps, and then he looks down with his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, letting his throat clear take the edge from this outburst she never would have expected from him. "I'm sorry. I, uh…I heard you…fudging talking to him? Fuck me. I don't know what to say."

He lifts his head.

"Just…would you tell me where he is?"

She pockets her phone with a sigh. "Look, he's made it sort of clear that he's not really interested in seeing you," she tells him, and every single part of him just crumples, his face so utterly wrecked that for just a moment she feels this tiny pang somewhere down deep in herself, where slumbers the Caroline who knows no vicious little manslut sniffing around her relationship, who sees only this tiny freaking kicked puppy of a thing in front of her, shoulders slumped.

"Is he mad at me, then?"

She sighs. "No. He's protecting you. He's…well, I don't exactly know the whole deal, but he's not exactly playing for our team at the moment. He's afraid Klaus will hurt you if he finds out Kol's still in town, and that he's probably working with…whoever it is he's working with. The witches, I'm guessing."

"Well, that's not for him to decide, is it?" He swallows thickly. "I can choose for myself, what's worth risking."

She leaves her hand in her pocket, drumming away at her phone with her nails.

"Please. I just want to see him."

He gives her the full force of this kicked puppy look of his, and, just, _God_, would you stop looking at her like she hates all things love, and sunshine, and joy- in second grade she harassed twenty seconds of embarrassed kissing out of Macie Greenwood and Devon Archer because they were seriously just the _cutest_, and their outfits didn't even clash, and last she checked they were still together, they'll probably be married, and go on to birth the generations she will never spawn, and so if you think she is immune to yearning, if you think she has never been pierced by just a name, and left crying in the dark-

Look.

It's not her _call _to make.

So she sends you away to the arms of a man who tries so hard not to let his loneliness through into his jokes, and you live, and you love, just for a while.

And then her boyfriend with the tender smile and the way he brushes her hair so gently from her cheek, he takes his hand, and he punches it through to your heart, and maybe she could have stopped it.

Maybe she could have _stopped _it.

"Please," he says in his soft little accent, and she shuts her eyes.

* * *

He juggles the phones of dead men while he waits.

There are naked pictures on the first (small cock, though, rather unfortunate-looking over all, really), quite a steamy text exchange between the owner of the phone and who he gathers to be the girlfriend's brother on the second, and the third disappointingly basic, which, fair enough, the man well made up for with his enthusiasm for 'alternative love' (the assortment of household items he craved in various orifices- quite fascinating, actually), but evidence is to be discarded, and so he tosses them small penis, gay affair, spatula asshole, into the skip, and claps his empty hands briskly together.

He'll pick up another somewhere down the lonely streets of this city empty of the innocent, here as the clock ticks her way round to one a.m.

Not that Nik's tracking her incoming calls (probably; perhaps; maybe), but no need to tie himself down to any one single number.

He checks his watch.

Late by five minutes, Caroline; going to get a mark for that one.

The priest story for sure, darling.

And here now are her footsteps (it's not so bad, darling; that priest gave as good as he got, with the repression built in him like a sickness) chipping away at the ice on the sidewalks, the breath high and strained in her throat-

No, too heavy.

Some man wearing his nerves like a cologne.

He leans against the wall at his back to delve his pockets for anything else that might be of interest while he waits, feeling all about the pea coat he stole from Nik to replace the one gone stiff and discolored with Tim's blood, giving his pecs a nice grope.

It's no wonder he hasn't got a 'no thanks' in his life.

The footsteps stop outside the alley, someone looking for a rob or a roll, he assumes, and he glances up with his most wicked smile.

It dies on his face.

Got what little beard he can conjure coming in, Tim does, and the stupid hat low on his eyebrows.

Not a jacket on him, of course, vest done up to the last button, pocket watch noisy in his hand.

He is not often surprised.

900 years will do that to you.

But when Tim closes the distance in two supernaturally quick steps and a hand on either cheek brings their mouths frantically against one another, he loses three stunned seconds of response.

And then he clutches the back of Tim's shirt in his hands and squeezes his eyes tightly shut -can't let the belief leak out of them with something so ill-advised as opening them- and he pulls the boy into him till they have taken care of the space between them, kissing the breath from them both.

They part for just a second, their lips still grazing, and then Tim presses a frenzied kiss to each part of his face he can get at, the dimple of his chin, tip of the nose, forehead, temple, back down the cheekbone, to the jaw line and the lips once more.

He pulls Tim's hips into him.

Up to the back of Tim's neck go his hands, to get him some leverage in this kiss that is all teeth and tongue and ragged gulps of air, and if these breaths are nearly sobs from relief or grief or lust, he couldn't tell you.

Tim breaks from him to kiss the dimple in his chin again, and they lean their foreheads against one another for a moment, smiling round their gasps.

"Hello; I'm Kol. And who are you?" he asks breathlessly, sifting his fingers through the hair at the nape of Tim's neck.

Tim pulls him in by the collar for another lingering kiss. "Gone to Europe have you, ya' fucker?"

"I was going to." He pushes the Donegal farther up Tim's forehead and kisses the slight mark its band has left behind. "But you know how it is, trying to escape my family. Till death never do us part." He puts himself nose to nose with Tim. "Caroline tattled on me?"

"Walked in on her talking to you. Well, I snuck up the stairs and spied on her soon as I heard your voice."

He kisses the corner of Tim's mouth. "I don't blame you. It would take a much stronger man than any of us to resist that particular voice." He pulls Tim's head down to get at the bridge of his nose with his lips. "You haven't seen me, though, darling. Nik will throw a fit. Go cool off at one of the pubs, and I'll see you…I don't know when I'll see you." He shuts his eyes again and draws out the three pecks he presses to Tim's lips.

"What's wrong with now?"

"I'm not sneaking round underneath the parents' noses, Tim. I think we're both a bit old to play Romeo and Juliet."

Tim grabs him by the cheeks once more, and squishes them nose to nose, his eyes shut, that little crinkle he just hates to see between his brows. "I'll decide when and if I want protection, you eejit."

"You didn't want to cross Nik. _I _don't want to cross Nik. Not in a way that puts you in between us, anyway."

"I changed me mind. I'll tiptoe round the fuckin' city, if that's what I need to do."

He strokes his hands down Tim's cheeks. "Nik will find out, Tim. He always does."

"Well, I realized five minutes after you left I'd have rather just gone with you, and risked the fucker anyway. And I'm a grown fucking man, and I'll decide what I get to risk."

"Tim." He moves his face from the boy's hands, and lowers his cheek to press it against his collarbones, getting himself fistfuls of Tim's vest.

"You don't want to?" Tim asks roughly, but the hand that comes up to touch his hair is very gentle.

"I'm pressed right against you. I think it's pretty obvious what I want to do."

"Fuck that fucker, Kol."

"You already did that, darling."

"I mean it. Fuck him. Fuck Klaus and all his _fucking_ goddamned rules and fuck him for dictatin' your whole bleeding fucking life and who you can or you fucking can't-"

He lifts his head, and presses his finger to Tim's lips. "Shh, shh, shh. You're going to work yourself up into a heart attack. And then what will I say to the homeless I feed every second Tuesday, when they happen past and find me standing over a dead man with my hand down my trousers because he got me all worked up, and it's taking him too long to come round?"

Tim's got the color quite up in his cheeks, chest heaving with his anger.

He kisses his neck, and leaves his lips there. "Where are you staying?"

"The Omni Royal."

He takes a deep breath, shuts his eyes for just a moment, drags his nose up the boy's neck until he finds his jaw, where he presses another kiss. "All right. I'll meet you there in twenty minutes. Make sure no one's following you. If you're not careful, I'll eat you myself."

* * *

He has his moment of terror, standing before the door with the vampire heart behind it, and the scent of Tim's soap, and the nervous click click clicking of that bloody pocket watch.

It's just-

Time or death or Nik-

They're interchangeable.

If not the one then the other, and always him left holding nothing.

But he knocks on the door.

He knocks on the door and he listens to the pocket watch stop clicking and the nervous stutter of the heart and then the footsteps, bare of their boots, cautious as they come, everything just as turbulent in Tim as his own fluttering anxiety.

Tim opens the door and steps back.

He nudges it shut behind him with his heel.

And then don't ask him why he does it, but he stands here for just a moment looking up the four inches to Tim's face, the bright blue eyes beneath their dark lashes and the tongue nervously out to wet his lips and the color still in his cheeks from wind or February or rage, who knows, and then he just leans forward, and he puts his cheek to Tim's chest and his arms round his waist.

And Tim-

He cups the back of his head in one hand and lets him just stay here as long as he likes.

He can't-

He can't tell you what that means to him.

It's just been quite a few weeks.

You know?

He swallows and readjusts his cheek just a little, slides his hands a bit farther up Tim's back, squeezes handfuls of his shirt.

He has often enough been a burden towed round through the centuries, and so he won't unload anything, darling, he's just felt so terribly fucking _heavy_, wondering is Nik really gone for good and has Bekah truly wiped him clean off her shoe as she always meant to do, and has Elijah- has Elijah-

He turns his face so it's his eyes pressed to Tim's chest.

"I know, you bastard. Shh. Shh," Tim tells him softly, and kisses the top of his head.

For a while he just listens to the beating of Tim's heart and the roughness of his own breath, and somewhere in the hotel a clock ticking, and beyond the window all the night owls up and flitting about, laughing with the lightness of their insignificant years.

He kisses the hollow of Tim's throat, just once, and then he leaves his lips parted against it, breathing into his skin as the boy strokes the back of his head.

Tim kisses his forehead.

He moves his mouth to the crook of his neck, kisses this almost tentatively, tastes it again, slowly lets go that fistful of shirt to grip Tim by the hips.

Tim kisses from his temple down to the line of his jaw, round to his dimple, the corner of his mouth, works his way back up to that temple again as his hands fumble up to find the first button of his coat.

They both pull back just a little.

He kisses Tim gently.

Tim gets the first button undone, and another kiss, a bit longer this time, and there goes the second button, the third.

He pulls Tim's shirt from his trousers and sneaks his fingertips under the hem, smoothing with his thumb that line of hair that vanishes down under his waistband.

Tim undoes his last three buttons and opens the coat.

Their tongues are in on the act now, everything still languid, his hands untangling themselves from where they have crept just beneath Tim's waistband to set off a series of shivers down the boy's back, his fingers beginning to pick at the buttons on Tim's vest as Tim tries to push the coat from his shoulders.

He drops his arms long enough for Tim to slide it off.

It sails away somewhere into the corner.

Tim's hands thrust in under his shirt to find the ridges of his abs.

He snatches the cap from his head and flings it after the coat.

He seizes Tim by both cheeks and kisses a moan out of him, their teeth coming together now, Tim hard against him, both of them beginning to grind a little, Tim's hand stumbling down to get a handful of his ass as they open their mouths.

He rips Tim' vest the rest of the way open, hooks his ankle round Tim's, trips him down onto the bed.

They grapple with Tim's shirt for a moment until with an expletive he pants into the side of Tim's neck he just rips the whole bloody thing down the middle, and helps him wriggle out of the scraps, his own shirt mussing his hair as Tim gives it a tug round the collar that sharply parts the stitching and yanks it over his head.

He settles down skin to skin against Tim, breathing shortly through his nose as Tim sneaks a hand down between them and strokes his cock through his jeans, bucking himself into Tim's hand as he kisses Tim's neck and shoulder, putting out his tongue to taste both his nipples, Tim arching underneath him, both of them breathing in rattly little gasps.

Tim trails his lips tenderly down his neck and onto his shoulder, his fingers sliding round to his belt.

He unbuttons Tim's trousers, and lifts himself just slightly so that he can work his trousers and boxers down just low enough to free his cock, Tim's fingers busy with his belt and then with his button, his own cock bobbing free as Tim slides down his trousers.

He presses himself down so that they are cock to cock and begins to thrust slowly with his hips, Tim's head dropping back against the sheets, his hands coming up to grip his ass, to guide his thrusts as he chokes off the little noise in the back of his throat, his eyes fluttering.

"Tim," he breathes, and kisses the tip of his nose.

Tim moves his hands off his ass, up his back, wraps his arms round his neck, pulls him down so that they are forehead to forehead as they slowly work their cocks against one another, breathing roughly into the other's mouth, the friction tangling all the words in his throat, Tim angling his head just slightly down to kiss just beneath his bottom lip, one hand separating out from the tangle round his neck to rasp a tender little brush along his stubble.

He nips Tim's ear. "Roll me over," he says breathlessly, and in a blink Tim is suddenly no longer beneath him.

A hand on the small of his back pushes him down onto his stomach.

Tim untangles his trousers from his legs, and then he's draped along his back, his lips busy at his neck, his palms sliding over the backs of his own hands, their fingers tangling, the strangled breath he lets out muffled into the sheets as Tim presses his first slow shallow thrust into him.

"Jesus," Tim chokes out, and kisses the first knot of his spine, turning his face to put himself cheek first against the nape of his neck.

He claws up handfuls of sheet and pushes his hips back into Tim.

Tim slips both arms under his chest and kisses the nape of his neck, giving another languid thrust of his cock, and another muffled cry and a squeeze of his eyes and he unearths his mouth from the sheets to gasp, "Angle up just a bit", and a slight shifting of his hips and Tim does just that, hugging him more tightly.

He feels Tim kiss his neck again, and shuts his eyes.

Tim pumps away like this for a while, pulling nearly out and then easing himself back in one excruciating inch at a time, exploring the slopes of his back and shoulder muscles with lips and tongue, kissing his jaw line and his cheek and the tip of his nose when he works his way back up, pressing them cheek to cheek as he begins to pick up his pace just a bit.

He puts himself up onto his forearms for leverage, clenching his jaw as he shoves his hips back, Tim's fingers digging into his ribs as he gives a little gasp, and now a hand slips round underneath him and finds his slick cock, Tim's thumb caressing the head.

He struggles up onto his knees.

Tim wraps his hand round his cock and begins to stroke him roughly, pounding away now, their breathing jagged, Tim's cock hitting him just exactly right, and with an, "Oh fuck; oh _shit_" he spurts all over Tim's fingers, but up and down the shaft his fingers keep up their friction, and he drops his head and he chokes on each breath he tries to take, and then Tim gasps, "Fuck; _fuck_" and he feels the warm surge of Tim's orgasm as a second one pulls a garbled expletive from his throat and coats Tim's fingers in another slick layer.

He collapses onto his stomach with Tim boneless on top of him.

They lie like that for a few moments, fighting the air back into them, and then Tim takes a few more shaky recovery breaths and pulls out of him, pressing a kiss to the center of his spine.

He ought to do up his trousers and go, with Nik lurking always in the periphery.

But Tim slinks up next to him and puts the hair out of his eyes, and he's got very gentle hands, the smiling little idiot, with his happiness so bloody raw on his face, so he decides instead to keep this moment for himself, to evict the entire lot of his family and the old shades of them that love him, love him not, and perhaps he puts a bit too much of himself in this return smile, but once or twice or thrice, however many times you've lived, darling, no sense in wasting it.

* * *

She lets herself be picked up and jerked back into the nearest alley with a sigh.

This is so totally not going to become a thing, because a thousand years of freaky man biceps aside, she does not just have to _take _your manhandling, which, _speaking of_, should so totally about right now be getting applied toward certain other 'handling' if you know what she means, and if you think for a second-

She takes a deeper pull of this rain-scented air, one long drink of February frost, and she understands suddenly that these are not the arms of Kol Mikaelson with their faint whiff of Ambre Topkapi cologne, and into her assailant's foot sinks her heel and around his neck go her pretty pink-gloved fingers, and a heave of her arm and a thrust of her hips and over her shoulder he sails, his spine breaking on the pavement.

"Caroline, _stop_! Caroline, it's me!" Tyler chokes out, and she freezes with her hand to his chest, fingers partway in.

* * *

**A/N: This graphically family-inappropriate gay sex scene brought to you by champagnekiss. All right, obviously it's brought to you by me, but I dedicate it to champagnekiss/champagnekissedbitch (as we know her on tumblr) for being so super enthusiastic about Kol and Tim's sweaty man love.**

**I know there isn't actually much Klaroline in this update, but they'll get theirs. Meanwhile, I did give you lots of Caroline, and Caroline/Kol bromance on top of that. Klaus is trying to put on his big boy pants and work on his issues (in his own super disturbed, murdery way), and he needs a bit of a breather for that. BUT GOOD THINGS COMING UP FOR THEM AND CAROLINE IN PARTICULAR. *Ominous villain laughter***

**Also, did you guys reeeeally think I'd get rid of Kol for good, having just brought him back? Of course not. This family has so much shit to still work out.**


	2. Part Two

**A/N: For once I'm just going to get on with it instead of babbling for three hours in an author's note that rivals the length of the chapter itself. You know the drill- warnings for violence, bad jokes, and the sex.**

**Also, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO AMANDA EIGHTEEN THIS IS GREAT NOW I WON'T GO TO JAIL FOR CORRUPTING YOU. All the love to my favorite stalker. I will never not have fond memories of you flipping out and threatening to eviscerate me if I was playing some kind of joke that one time I anonymously messaged you on tumblr.**

* * *

"What are you still _doing _here, Tyler?"

She takes a breath of winter, and pulls her bloody hand from his chest.

"You cannot be here. Klaus will kill you if he finds out. Or did you forget that your, like, _mortal enemy _is the most powerful man in the world and is right now embroiled in a supernatural _war _that, oh yeah, just so happens to put him on the side opposite whatever pack you're hanging around with these days!"

"Caroline," he chokes out as his spine re-links itself.

"Don't you think this is probably the _last _place you should be? Don't you think that, maybe, you should be anywhere, _anywhere _but here?"

"What? You can't keep your boyfriend in line?" he snaps, and she lets the silence pile itself like snow between them.

"Don't talk to me like that."

"Why? Because you're his queen, or his empress, or whatever the hell it is he's made you? Or his _bitch_?"

"_Bye_," she says, and spins on her heel.

"Caroline, _wait_. Please," Tyler calls after her, and she stops.

She always stops.

She has always let herself be something over which all others' needs tread, kicking her as they go.

But she grew teeth.

She grew teeth and she shed her tutu and still she was little Caroline Forbes of the friends who chose someone else and the boys who left her behind, and she diluted so _much _of herself in this small town boy who picked as the world always will someone who is not her.

"Caroline, I don't know why you're with him. I'm not…I'm not going to even try and understand it, ok? We just need your help. That's how you make this up to your friends. To all the people we've lost. To everything he's _done _to us. You know everything. You know who works for him, what he's planning, where he's going to hit next- we need that information."

She looks up into the sky.

"Please, Caroline. Tell us whatever you can. I won't let him hurt you, I promise."

"I'm not doing that," she says tonelessly.

"Why? You're always the only one who's been able to get past Klaus, who can come out alive no matter what. We're trying to smooth relations with the witches; the only way we're going to take him down is to do it together. We need your help. Caroline- maybe there's some way we can get rid of him for good, without killing off his bloodline. It's worth _trying_. It's worth looking for _something_. He's done so much-"

"I know all that, Tyler"

"But you're not going to help us."

"Nope."

"Because you think his crush on you is going to last? Because he's paying _attention _to you-"

"Tyler, I will always love you," she says with her back still to him, and then a blink and a pivot and her right hook smears his nose across his face and he drops choking on the clots.

But he didn't mean it, she watches him say with his eyes.

It's just his _mother_.

A whole sea of boys adrift without their natal tethers, just stumbling into the years.

Is this what Elizabeth Anne Forbes will leave behind when she goes, she wants to know, and she stands looking down at Tyler on his knees before her, his nose bloodying his hands to the wrist.

"Caroline, I'm sorry. I don't want anyone to get hurt," he says, all in pieces, like each of these words is a thing to be dredged up and spit out, and she turns away, and she keeps walking, because it's what she never did.

* * *

He can tell the fidgety little thing has less-than-stellar news, because the man pauses in the door of his office for nigh on a bloody year, just wringing his shaking hands.

"Well, mate?" he asks, sitting back in his chair and lifting both his hands.

He folds them behind his head and puts his feet up on his desk.

"Caroline was seen with one of the werewolves yesterday. They walked into some alley together. She left alone, but he wasn't far behind her, so she didn't kill him. We don't, uh, we don't…" The boy wets his lips.

Come on, then, mate.

He hasn't got all day.

He smiles humorlessly.

You know how he gets, put on tenterhooks in this way. Because he has before him years the stars themselves cannot comprehend does not excuse the frittering of his seconds.

"We don't know much about him. Don't have a name yet. He came in with one of the newest packs."

"Did anyone get a good look at him?"

"Yeah. But we didn't hear what they were saying."

"Well? Have you a description? Perhaps an anecdote? Anything that makes you more useful than this fumbling round?"

"Black hair. Big guy. I mean, not tall- but really built. Like a weightlifter. Or a jock. You know- maybe a football player. That type. Wearing a leather jacket and jeans."

Interesting how far down inside him reaches the pain of this smile he dredges up from the blackest parts of him.

"Put someone on her. Not yourself- she knows you. Pick up a human. A complete stranger; bring them back to me." There is a step outside on the sidewalk, a breath exhaled into the gray afternoon, the rustling of pockets in whose depths he smells watch metal and spearmint gum. "Actually- is that Tim I hear downstairs?" he asks as the front door whisks open.

Tim appears in his doorway a moment later. "It's me."

Had yourself a roll in the hay, then, mate, have you? Hair hastily reordered beneath the cap; that particular variety of sweat lingering beneath your soap; the microscopic rip of the first shirt button not plucked but torn.

Well, then, Timothy.

Good for you.

"Let's have Timothy do it, shall we?" He gestures expansively. "Timothy, mate- Jared here is about to be indisposed, so I'm going to need you to pick me up a human and bring them back here. Unharmed."

He snaps the left arm from his chair, and hurls it straight into the chest of this boy who just cannot duck quite fast enough, shame about that.

He was rather pretty.

Tim might have liked him, were he not off catting round some other bloke whose tastes run to the rather elitist in regards to his aftershave.

Amouage, is it?

He prefers something of the woodsy variety, himself.

"Clean him up. And get someone to fix my chair. Then go and pick up something obedient for me," he tells the boy, who stands very straight beside this corpse still finishing up its withered gray death.

"Right."

He tilts his head. "Anything new to report to me?"

"No."

"You're quiet. I mean, moreso than usual. Sure there's nothing you want to get off your chest, darling? 'Mate', I meant." He tips his head playfully from side to side. "You'll excuse a slip from time to time. You spend nine centuries together, you get all tangled up in one another."

Tim slips a hand into his pocket.

That watch of his fires off a nervous click.

"Speaking of getting tangled up in one another- how was he?"

The boy bangs the watch shut once more, opens it with a shaky click.

"Your friend, I mean?" He raises his eyebrows innocently. "The one whose aftershave you've got all mingled up with your own?"

"Do you own me sexual exploits now, too?"

He dimples. "Of course not, mate. I'll settle for your soul. Just making conversation."

Tim closes his pocket watch again. "The body, the chair, the human- anything else?"

"I think that's it. I'll give the leash a tweak if I need anything further." He smiles pleasantly and leans back in his chair once more, folding his hands beneath his chin.

Tim hoists the body up one-handed and vanishes.

* * *

He follows Tim for a good ten minutes, and there's something of his presence scratching away at the boy's instincts, because he starts to bury himself in the crowd, to put between them an entire wall of fragrant humans with their necks like perfume, his head bent but not obviously clandestine, his hands in his pockets, his stride just casual enough.

He's good at this.

Picked himself up quite the instincts in Ireland, dodging British and those observers of static cheek and brow, coating their stakes in that nonchalant suspicion of the overly-interested.

How do you do it, they always want to know.

Tell me your secret.

Is there a cream, some apothecary glue which sticks back together all the pieces Time so callously dismantles?

Absolutely, he told the girl who put her little stick in his chest and then backed away with a scream when he pulled it from his heart and he broke it over his knee.

Crème de l'Vierge.

Well.

He never limits himself to virgins -so few of those, whatever insisted those sly Victorian years with their frothy curtains round the filth- but it's just got quite the ring to it, you know?

History does love its sacrificial lambs with their hymens and their haloes.

He watches Tim step into one of the shops lining the street, and he slips between this building and the one snug on its left, trailing his hand down the wall.

He hears the stealthy heel-toe padding of someone slipping out the back, and he smiles and leans his shoulder against the wall and listens to Tim's breath go a bit impatient in his throat, his hand slipping on his gun.

Come on, darling.

Show him a bit of that Celtic initiative.

No?

Just going to stand round and shuffle your feet and wait for him to walk himself into your trap?

All right then.

He puts his hands in his pockets.

He always did look a bit less harmful that way. Mr. Joe College, out for his afternoon stroll, smiling round his midterm woes.

No sooner round the corner and Tim has an arm around his neck and both of them out of the public's view, and up go his empty hands over his head, his smile leaking through into his voice.

"I'm unarmed; just happy to see you."

"_Fuck_."

"Oh, come on. You knew it was me as soon as you grabbed me. You won't find this sort of ass on just any stalker," he says, and presses himself back into Tim.

"I thought you might be fuckin' Klaus."

"No; that's one sin I haven't tried yet."

"You know what I meant, you fucker."

"So you thought I was Nik, and you were just going to snatch him and…what? Shoot him in the head? Or is that not a gun in your pocket?"

Tim drops his arm.

He turns round to face him. "Meet me at the Hilton tonight? The one on St. Charles?"

Well, that's not the sort of enthusiasm he expected to see, after what you spent the whole of last night doing to him. "What's wrong?"

Tim shakes his head. "Nothing."

He's lying, of course.

He's only good at it if you don't know him.

"Really." He leans in closer. "Liars get a spanking."

That eases a bit of a smile out of him. "Well, I'll try and keep me truths to an absolute bare minimum, then."

"Strictly comments about my handsomeness."

"Obviously."

"So will I see you tonight?"

"Sure." Tim purses his lips and nods. "I'll slip away. But I've got to go. Your brother's put me on another one of his tasks. Pretty sure he'll let his girlfriend eat my balls if I don't get it taken care of in a timely fashion."

"You heard that rumor too?"

"Do you think it's true?"

He ducks his head and laughs. "Are you scared of her?" He looks up from beneath his eyebrows. "You're blushing. Caroline Forbes is the monster hiding in your closet."

"Ah, come on- fuck off."

He laughs again. "And so you drive your date out to some generic lover's point, you start putting the moves on them…then all of a sudden, a burst of static from the radio. And the emergency test sound, only this time it's not a test. The nearby asylum for the criminally insane has just lost a patient, the radio announces- the most fearsome and dangerous of all their inmates, a hideous murderer, slayer of innocent Irish boys. Everyone is cautioned to remain inside and keep their doors locked- but what's that now? Something scratching along the side of the car- you turn the radio down. Your date takes their hand out of your trousers. You think happy thoughts about handsome English boys. There's a burst of thunder. Another scrape down the side of the car. You're still thinking about handsome English boys. One in particular. He shall remain unnamed. Big cock. There's another scratch along the bonnet now; you see nothing through the window. You hear only the shrieking of the metal and the breathing of your date. And then- a strike of lightning. And illuminated in its flash stands…_Caroline Forbes_, bloody hook held aloft and the penises of innocents between her rabid, animalistic teeth!"

"Go fuck yourself," Tim says, and he dodges the boy's playful shove, laughing.

He grabs Tim by the collar of his shirt and backs him against the wall, and he allows him one little breath before he kisses his knees shaky, pulling back just a bit when neither of them have got the air to continue and leaning his forehead against Tim's. "10:00?"

"Right, you fucker," Tim breathes. "I'll see you then."

He lets Tim slip out ahead of him, slapping his ass as he passes.

* * *

Such a peach, that Timothy.

One human, unmarred down to the nearly-pubescent skin on her china doll cheeks.

Shivering just a bit, poor thing. Probably thought this pretty young man was taking her for a nice bite to eat and then perhaps a little dessert, if you know what he means, because youth these days- so presumptuous, the whole lot of them, nothing bound up about them, sexuality plain as their noses, nothing of them buttoned away behind the staid cravats and bloomers of old.

Shh, shh, sweetheart.

There, there.

Nothing to worry about, love. All he requires is for you to document what is sure to be the downfall of everything he holds closest to his black and wasted heart.

He's sure you'll make it out just fine.

* * *

"And I slip my burning love rod into your shuddering man tube and there I slide in and out, in and out, until with a helpless roar you shriek my name to the heavens: 'Oh _Kol, _you British beast!' and, overcome by the sound of my own name, I groan, my tool with the thick fleshy lips spitting in droplets like lava the milky tears of my erotic dew," the fuckin' eejit whispers in his ear, and he laughs until the tears burn his cheeks, smothering the worst of it in his pillow.

"Where in the fuck did you get that?"

"What? You don't appreciate a little dirty talk?" Kol asks, draping a leg lazily over his own. "I'm offended. That was some of my best work. And it's not from anywhere; I just appropriated a bit of inspiration from _Teleny_."

"Who's that? Somebody you fucked?"

"No, but I appreciate the jealousy in your voice, darling. It's a book. You've never heard of it?"

"No."

Kol tucks his face into the back of his neck, one of his arms flopping over him as well, and he reaches up and touches his fingertips for one tentative moment to Kol's own, feeling up the outline of his daylight ring like it's what he meant to do all along, and then he links them palm to palm and he works himself just slightly deeper into this messy embrace, lifting Kol's wrist for a sneak of a kiss.

"_Teleny_, Timothy, is a popular 19th century children's novel about the heart-touching friendships that blossom in the unlikeliest of places."

"What the fuck kind of children's novels are you readin'?"

Kol plants him on his back with a jerk, and there the bastard goes with that smile of his, nearly putting his fecking heart through his sternum, the charming shithead. "No, I lied," he says. "_Teleny _is an anonymously-written 19th century erotica sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde. It's also graphically gay. Imagine Elijah's shock, when he thought he was getting himself into another play or maybe a short story or a ballad."

He laughs.

Kol pins his wrists over his head.

"Actually, Elijah had a rather torrid affair with King James I back in the day. I know 'torrid' is to Elijah what 'ugly' is to me, but trust me. I walked in on some of it. Actually, I talked him through it."

"What, did he need your tips?"

"No, he was doing just fine on his own. I just thought he might like some kind of narration. And thus was the voiceover invented. 'Verily was it not my intention to slip my cock thus, between thine plush half moons, into thine core of mandom. But, alas, Fate stays not her hand for intentions, which pave in gold my path to Dante's gates.' Thus also was ham-fisted foreshadowing born."

He smiles up at Kol, opening his fists so Kol can slide his fingers up into his own. "And how did Elijah take your new inventions?"

"He finished and dressed and then gave me a lecture about conducting ourselves with class and the respect of privacy, and also the political faux pas that is addressing a king as 'His Majesty the Queen'. With his foot on my neck."

"Standing up for him like that- was your brother in love with him, then?"

"Oh, no; he wasn't talking about James. He was talking about himself. Anyway, he thought _Teleny _was 'pedestrian' and 'purple', but I don't think he was terribly scandalized by it. Nik and I used to like to do dramatic readings of it, and force him to watch whenever he got really dull. Once he walked into the house, and Nik and I had set up a stage in our living room, with props and everything, and Nik snags him and I leap up onto the bridge we cobbled together out of Elijah's favorite table and the legs from his favorite chair, and several of his books we'd painted up to look like bricks, and I stood on it and let loose with this whole monologue of inner demons about this love of mine I feel slipping away into another man's arms, and how shall I go on, and he's standing there with his arms pinned over his head by Nik, going all tight about the face like he does when he's really angry, and he starts correcting my grammar, and by that point we knew we were really in trouble, so Nik's still got hold of him, trying to figure out how to let him loose without getting ourselves put in his stocks, and I hop down from our bridge and tell him good luck, and I bolted for the door. Nik said a word I can't possibly repeat in front of the youth and let loose of Elijah to try and grab me as I sprinted past, which of course freed up Elijah to put him in a headlock, and I never did find out what Elijah did to him, because I ran for about two years before Nik tracked me down in Paris and drowned me in the Seine till I said I was sorry. I had my fingers crossed, though. We also used to just slaughter some of Shakespeare's works for his viewing pleasure, until he killed us. We'd wake up with blood to the ceiling," he says, and he laughs till there's pain in it, so he strains up far as he can and gently kisses the bastard's chin, and he rests his forehead there until Kol lets up on his wrists and cups the back of his head, and round the fucker's bare waist go his arms, so that at least he knows.

Don't have to lean on your family's love until it collapses underneath you.

"Want to go eat people?" Kol asks finally, pulling his head back by the hair at the nape of his neck and stroking the feathery strands there. He presses their noses together. "Want to help me take a shower first?"

They both smile.

"And once you come back with blood to your fuckin' elbows?"

"You can help me take another shower." Kol flicks his tongue.

* * *

Go all out, he always says.

So when Tim creeps back to report that Nik hasn't got any lackeys within four blocks of their play area, he strides out into the street, hands in his pockets, and he smiles amicably at this pimply blonde soldier's request for ID.

He tilts his head.

He slaps the boy's head across the street.

"Motherfucker Jesus _Christ_!" his partner screams, voice high as a girl's, and Tim gets his hand into the poor thing's vocal cords, and wads them up into one pink mess he shakes off his fingers into the street half-frozen beneath them.

He kicks in the door of the Voodoo Authentica, where they have set themselves up a temporary home till the Bourbon Orleans can be replaced.

"Greetings, soldiers. Put down your weapons, please. I don't want any trouble."

Tim shoots six of them through the head before they can blink.

"I was just kidding. I'm a great kidder."

He takes a bullet to the cheek and cracks his neck.

Over the counter goes Tim as the store erupts, and into the center of it he strides, just considering his options, giving them all a contemplative squint of his eyes, one thumb feeling the stubble on his chin, head tipped thoughtfully to one side. "You know, I actually once considered a career in comedy," he tells a man he punches in the face until he's all mashed together, his features gone runny as his blood. "I don't know if you knew that." He ducks a swing from a soldier who's panicked all his ammo into the wall and now has only this little club of a thing, splashed to the sights with his friends' blood.

He breaks it over his knee, snaps the man next, tosses them both aside.

He slips the man's M9 from his holster and lobs it toward the counter. "Tim."

Up pops that cap, then down again it bobs.

"My brother, actually- he sort of invented stand-up comedy, so, I mean, it's practically the family business. He wasn't very good at it though."

"That's because all his fecking jokes start with 'Did you hear about?' Insert the shittiest follow-up you can think of and you've got yourself a Michelson 'act'."

"The man who got hit in the head with a can of soda? He's lucky it was a soft drink."

"The crime that happened in a parking garage? It was wrong on so many levels."

He slams two of the soldiers' heads together so hard their skulls split inside their helmets with a great crack.

Tim pops up over the counter once more, M9 in hand, and fires off a couple of shots into the smoke.

"Be careful. You almost grazed me."

"I wasn't anywhere fuckin' near you!"

"He's very proud of his shooting skills. Double entendre intended," he tells the soldier he lifts whimpering by the throat, and winks.

Tim shoots the man out of his hand.

He swivels round toward the counter. "That one was mine."

Tim grins.

He dips down to let the counter take the brunt of this fusillade let off by the final two, and then down goes that M9 with a clatter, and Tim flashes out into the thick of it unarmed, and the little shit's about to fall on the one he's picked out, so he hip checks him sideways into the wall, rips out the man's carotid, turns on the last with a smile.

Tim tackles him.

They hit the floor hard enough to crack his hip, but he's the use of all his other limbs, so he strikes out with his arm and sweeps the man's legs out from underneath him as Tim's wriggling round on top of him, trying to get hold of the man, and a brief struggle and he lets Tim wrap his fingers round the man's ankle, jerking him with a scream along the floor.

He throws Tim off him.

"So close, darling," he says, snapping his fingers.

He buries his face in the man's throat.

The soldier drops back against the floor with a rather hollow thud and he sits up with one arm draped over his knees, the other going up to wipe his mouth.

Tim points at him. "You're a little shit, Mikaelson."

"Don't be such a Nik about it, O'Sullivan."

Tim drops his head, his shoulders shaking. "I'll have to remember that one."

He leans forward to put both his elbows on his knees, and smiles up into the boy's eyes. "I'll even let you take credit for it."

"Oh, well, thank you. Don't ever let anyone tell you you're not just fuckin' grand."

"I tell myself that every day."

"In your mirror."

"With my hand down my trousers."

Tim cracks his neck and leans his head back against the wall, still smiling.

"How long do you think we have until the police show up?" he asks, dusting all the little debris of death from his trousers as he stands.

"Few minutes, probably."

"Do you want to wait for them?"

"Nah. Let's make a daring, last-minute getaway." Tim takes off his cap and runs a hand through his hair, ruffling it till it stands up just a touch, his sweaty forehead keeping just a few of the strands for itself.

He watches the muscles in Tim's forearms as he shakes the worst of the blood from his cap, and when the boy glances up to catch him at it, there's a little smile and the flush of the cheeks, really just bloody precious, isn't he, and then the rising of the sirens pulls their eyes from one another and dart them toward the window, and Tim presses his hat back down onto his head.

"So when is this daring escape of yours supposed to take place? Or do we wait till they're literally kicking down the door, darling?" he asks, and drags one thumb slowly over the dimple in his chin, to smudge away the last of his meal.

Tim flashes to the door, and peeps his head round the corner, one shoulder resting on the jam, his thumb hooking itself over the edge of his pocket, those forearm muscles standing out once more as he lounges like this, one leg kicked casually out in front of him, hips cocked just a little forward, head back against the jam.

Just a picture, darling.

"About two minutes, do you think?" Tim asks him.

He pulls the boy from doorway by the collar of his shirt. "About," he says, and presses Tim back into the wall with his hips, both hands on his cheeks.

You could say the sun comes out on his face, when he smiles.

He didn't see it much when Nik had his hands on him, but there'd be a slip of it every so often, the whole of him lit up, just bloody brilliant, and he'd stop, and he'd stare for a moment, and he'd go off himself, his lips hurting with the stress of it, because nothing for a smile like that but to be made light by it, to remember it's not only through shadows that you must toil, that so too exists the sunlight he sometimes forgets to see.

A whole lot of rot, he knows.

But there are such smiles.

You gather that up too, with your 900 years of filth.

Tim wraps both hands round his wrists and leans in to kiss him, and he squeezes his eyes shut, both of them sighing through their noses, Tim pulling back just slightly to catch his breath, eyes still shut, and then he shuts them tighter still and swoops in once more to kiss him dumb, all the jokes gone right out of him.

In the distance rise the sirens and up his thigh creeps the hand Tim peels from his wrist to feel up the line of his trousers, thumb sliding high enough to make him twitch, and when at last the tires shriek to a halt farther down the street he breaks away with a shuddery breath, smiling hazily. "Taking it right up to the wire, are you?"

The car doors screech open and into the street flood the officers, the poor things all strained about the throats, the breath gone tight and thin in them, the hands sliding about wetly on their guns, the hearts with their animal quickness pushing the thirst up near his lust, his fangs tickling his gums with their quick peep into his mouth-

Tim runs his tongue over one of them.

He shuts his eyes and lets himself shudder through this.

The boots reach the doorway.

"Put your hands where we can see them!" someone screams, but a warning like that's only a leftover bit of training, with the bodies piled round you in still-warm stacks.

He wraps his arms round Tim and whips them both to the side, putting his own back in the path of their first thunderous barrage, and as the little nuisances open him up from his shoulders to his waist, he tips himself up onto his toes to give the boy's chin a playful nip. "You're in luck, darling- not a single wooden bullet among them." He lands a kiss on Tim's ear. "Off you go, then."

* * *

He stares out the window when the human makes her reports.

Regular meetings of the clandestine variety, alleyway excursions, side street jaunts, all the shadowy little nooks which lend themselves to lovers.

But she hasn't the gall to sneak in close enough to overhear those heartfelt whispers of the suppressed, she confesses in her own whisper, and so with a smile he takes her chin in hand, and he strokes his thumb lightly down her lovely cheek, and he tells her do not be afraid, sweetheart, for it is not just man with his heart full of mercy.

He snaps her neck mid-way through her stammered thank you.

Or maybe it is.

* * *

Fee-fi-fo-fum.

He smells the blood of an Englishman.

"Please," stammers the poor new thing with his fangs hardly defiled, his chest laid open to the heart. "That's all I _know_."

He likes that little dimple in your chin, mate.

And those blonde curls- such a sheen to them, put your fingers right through them all the way to the root, to feel the slip of that commercial luster, thumb tender along those few flyaway imperfections.

He rips them out.

The man screams.

He puts his heel so hard through that little dimple of the chin that the man's entire jaw shifts with a crunch.

"No no no no no no _no_- Jesus _Christ_," the man sobs.

Well, don't look at him like that, darling.

Mate.

He means mate.

Of course he does.

Anyway.

He quite concurs.

No no no no no no _no _indeed.

* * *

"Tim," he tells the boy one evening, as they are strolling along almost companionably he should say, Tim's hands in his pockets, his swinging freely, the street lights draping them both in that soft butter of the lamp. "Take that nice officer's gun from him, and shoot him in both kneecaps."

Tim stops.

"Right in front of the fuckin' barricade the soldiers have set up?" he hisses, and never say this one hasn't a bit of rebellion in him after all.

But they all bend.

Time, death, his family who will flee and flee again, who will never stop returning at the only incentive he can manage, that twiddling of the leash that brings them all, man, creature, friend, foe, scampering round to his side where he secures them as they all must be managed, with the chains of the damned.

So the boy steps into the street and he seizes from this officer of the law the weapon he uses to put a round in either leg before the horrified eyes of tourist and local alike, and he puts on a show, truly he does, he applauds the lad through it, letting off that strident whistle of the appreciative audience, but in the end though he collects the hearts of half a dozen soldiers, poor Tim lies twitching in the street, leaky as the clouds which have opened their pores above his head, breaths rattling in his chest.

"You'll be all right, mate," he says cheerfully, and steps over him. "Which of you isn't on vervain, hmm?" he asks of the survivors who empty their magazines into his chest, shrugging off this assault as he has shrugged off so many similar offensives, head tilted to one side, hands politely folded.

What a little thing steps forward.

He pats him on the head.

He fires this pistol the lad so kindly passes him into the heads of the boy's armored friends.

"What a shame- some man, right out of the middle of nowhere, ranting about constitutional rights and the militarization of the police- quite the nuisance are those buggers, am I right?" He ruffles the boy's hair mischievously. "You were taken by surprise. You were the only survivor. He was wounded multiple times- dragged himself off somewhere. Better put a search party out for him. Looks like the tide's beginning to turn with the citizens. You might want to have a care with them from now on. Never know where the enemy is lurking. Good lad," he says, and pats the head just even with his chin once more.

Tim rolls himself onto his back, spitting blood.

"Come on, Tim- where's your sense of adventure? Play along." He turns the boy gently round to face him as Tim struggles up onto his knees. "You've got a description of the perpetrator, mate. Go on; call it in."

He smiles.

Tim spits another glob of blood.

Well that's quite a look, now isn't it, mate.

Almost as if you wished him harm.

That pierces him.

Truly.

You wouldn't believe how soft he is, beneath this carapace of years.

He shoots Tim in the calf, and the boy buckles, splashes forward onto his hands and knees in this dripping pink street. "Better hurry, mate."

He smiles again.

He hands the soldier his pistol and the boy wings a shot off Tim's shoulder as he garbles a request for back-up into his radio, and with another gout of blood -that's a rather alarming amount of the stuff; better have an eye to that, Timothy- he pushes off his knees and he staggers shakily to his feet, and into a nearby parking garage he stumbles as the soldier squeezes off another round that skims white cinders along the pavement.

"Have a good one, Tim!" he calls out, lifting his hand in farewell.

* * *

He hurtles the cars and he bellies out underneath them as the soldiers run him down like a bleedin' rat, the blood in his mouth, his eyes, his fecking _ears_, just roaring away, the shakes all through his fuckin' legs and his shoulders, heart pressed like a fist against his sternum, pounding the whole goddamn length of his chest to the same jelly what's in his knees, and overhead flash the little stars of those lights never deterred a robber or a rapist in his life, and please, oh fucking _please_, God-

It's not for him that's abandoned you to appeal to your mercy, and he's _lived_.

He understands he has.

But coughing up the foam of his life onto the tarmac underneath him, it doesn't feel like it, him still young in his skin though his soul's long gone to rot.

He's a selfish goddamn gom he is, clasping his hands for the few more years to which he is no longer entitled, him with the decades just fecking heaped on him.

But if you have left him for _whatever _fucking _reason_, his sins of flesh or soul, at least let him, Jesus Mary and Joseph _let him _not go alone to the fate he fears greatest of all.

He lies bleeding out beneath the chassis of some truck, listening to their boots miss him by a row, everything echoing in this cavern, the whispers and the steps and the click click clicking of the rifles reaching him a thousand, thousand times.

For so long he lies so, emptying himself everywhere.

And then he picks himself up as all man must, though it puts all the worst parts of his stomach through his nose and his mouth, and he staggers his way home to the dark figure waiting on his bed, and what in the hell happened Kol wants to know, of course he does, and oh, the poor fucker's heart.

He just can't cut it up like that.

So he just falls into his chair, smearing his weary night all up the back of it, and he takes off his boots with shaking hands and he fires off with some nonsense about a bit of bad luck, and no mention for a moment of that brother of his who one day will push him to the breaking point, and the outcome of that particular clash- well, has he to spell it out for you, then?

So he says his good-byes.

He says his good-byes in all the deepest parts of him, where he first buried this friend of his who kneels to help him with his buttons, and of course he wants to know will it hurt and is there a bright light come down from the heavens and have you a hand to lead you forth and will his ma cross this divine separation of man and monster to find him as he has lived most of his years, alone with his leaden tongue and the fetters of his shyness just dragging him down and down, her nose turned up for shame, because fuck him he doesn't want to go _alone_.

So his life has been an island- is his death to be the same, marooned with his memories?

Is that all he's to have?

"What's wrong?" Kol asks him, and he shakes his head, and he covers for himself as his friend always does, with a smile.

It just fuckin' hurts, he says, and God you fuckin' strike him down where he sits if he's telling a lie, you fuckin'- you fuckin' _strike him down_, bastard, he _dares _you-

He didn't think so.

* * *

She hasn't seen him in over a week when he steps into his office so stealthily she barely even registers the pressure of his heels against the floor, and the way she looks up from the file in her hand- it's too hasty, he'll sniff out the guilt in it, there's a spark, a tremor, a nervous tweak of one of her curls that will give it away to this man who knows everything, who lets nothing pass unnoticed, who for a thousand years has put himself on the scent of his never-ending prey and ran them to their end.

But his look is just…_so full_.

So she sets down her file.

She sets down her file and she closes the space between them and she rests her cheek against his chest, and she doesn't embrace him, that's for him to do if he wants, but she fits herself to him and she breathes him in, rain and aftershave and the fresh whiff of his thin leather jacket, and there's a breath like he's drowning, and then he's clutching her so _hard_, and then so quickly she stumbles forward and nearly falls, he is gone.

* * *

Nik is not looking at her when he says, "You won't leave, will you?"

Her brother's story is not a tragedy, she thinks, for calamity lowered upon one's own head does not retain its pity when its target is both perpetrator and prey.

But it very nearly is.

He goes alone because his fear has made him such a small thing on the inside, this renaissance monster of a million philosophies absorbed from the pens of worldlier men.

But we choose our loneliness, Nik.

You never did understand that.

Such a boy, her brother.

So when the world has burnt itself to a crisp beneath the wars of these humans whose small lives detonate with such force they pit the planet for centuries, he will prop his boot on the husks of them all, because such is his fate, he tells himself, this is the skin into which he was stitched and in which he must remain bound, but he'll have clawed himself all the way to that summit of the dead, crested by no other.

She watches him smooth the edge of his drawing with his thumb.

He glances up just briefly.

She cocks her head and laces her hands on her knee.

She'd never tell you, Nik.

She'd never tell you, but all her very long life she has cut away a few fibers at a time this tether you have built of her loves and her loneliness and one day with light and joyful heart she will snap the final strand and away she will soar, as history has never allowed her kind to fly.

A woman for the traces, and man at his whip.

It makes no difference if you pat the poor beast's nose and give it a good crooning before you lash it off down through the years with your hand always round its survival, Nik.

But she says no.

Of course not.

Kol has fled, Elijah gotten himself all tangled up in that Petrova tart, and so whatever her thoughts on your handling of their dear undeparted brother, you bloody fumbling idiot, there's always need of a handler to loiter round and pinprick that ego back down to reasonably manageable proportions.

Caroline is an apt pupil, of course.

But she hasn't yet the left hook to smear your narcissistic twat smile across your face, Nik dear.

"Are you getting this lighting?" she snaps, tilting her head. "You know it's the one I look best in."

And he smiles, and he adds a line to his sketchpad, and he probably knows -she wouldn't dare to say it out loud, but he knows everything, really he does- one day these two blonde loves of his will be sketched from pale memories in a studio where he hunches alone, and somewhere out in the great wide world all the friends he didn't know how to keep and the family he never understood how to love cavort round smiling all the wider for his absence, and he'll live in his tower of ivory and iron with the throne surrounded by blank echoing halls and there lies all the power in the world whisper the myths of men, and the monster who can't be slain.

And oh, Nik.

If she could save you from yourself.

* * *

"Have we just lived too long, Elijah?" she asks one night as her brother drinks gracefully from his glass of O negative.

"Maybe happiness is finite."

Kol wouldn't say that.

Kol would be sure to find the joke in every last black corner of the earth.

But he left.

He left smiling after all those words she stuck into his heart, and she'll never forget that.

"Rebekah," he says, and when she lets slip that frail shell of bitch and she hastily wipes at her eyes before he can see, Elijah sets down his glass and he rises from his chair to hold her not as Nik does, like he knows what will happen when he lets go, but with a gentle hand on the back of her head, and her face clasped loosely to his neck.

"I just want him back, Elijah," she whispers, pressing her eyes against his shoulder. "Both of them."

* * *

"I hope your confession was a good one," he says, yanking the curtain of the confessional shut behind him.

He leans down to kiss Tim roughly. "You're going to need to be forgiven for a lot."

"Oh really?" Tim pants, pulling them both down onto the bench, their legs tangling in the cramped space.

They bump noses leaning in to kiss again, and he turns his head to the side to smother a laugh in Tim's shoulder.

Tim licks the side of his face, and pulls away laughing.

"Oh, right, well if that's the way you want to play it." He pins Tim down by the wrists and leaves a trail of spitty affection across his face, getting a good sloppy kiss in right on the lips with the boy slurring laughter and expletives through the assault, hips twisting underneath him.

He pulls back with a smile. "Do you remember the first time we were here?"

"In the church, or the confessional booth?"

"The booth."

"You compelled that woman to watch me suck your prick. And then we ate her."

"I thought it was very romantic."

"You've the soul of a poet, Mikaelson."

He ducks his head down to kiss Tim again.

He moves from his mouth to his chin, down his throat, sliding his hands up off Tim's wrists and wriggling his fingers up into Tim's till they are both white with the grip they've got on one another. "Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!" He kisses Tim's neck, his jaw. "For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night." He nuzzles Tim's ear, and lightly bites it. "Talking about the first time I saw you naked, by the way. And not my heart."

"You're a fucker, Romeo." Tim strains up to kiss him, and for a moment they lose themselves in this, their fingers tightening, the breathless lust of this furtive meeting softening into something else, till he has to let up on Tim's hands to grab the back of his neck and pull him even closer, half-raising the boy up off the bench.

"You can't die, do you know that?" he asks when he has got the breath back to say it. "Please?"

Tim's whole face crumples. "Oh, you fucker."

"I wish I'd come and found you right away. When Elijah undaggered me. I should have just said piss on them all and set off," he confesses roughly, and he doesn't bother to patch this over with a smile, he's not even sure he can, with the terror in him just squeezing and squeezing, Tim holding both his cheeks now, and his thumbs the gentlest things he's ever felt, stroking from the corners of his mouth to the edge of his jaw. "I didn't even consider it," he says, swallowing his way through the words as Tim just lies here patiently listening. "When I show up-" He wets his mouth nervously; Tim touches his thumb tenderly to his bottom lip. "When I show up- it's to be an extra. And it'd been almost a century." There is a breath through his lips, laugh or sigh or cry, either way, it's no sound for a clown, but the thumbs go on, just stroking, and there's no squint of the eyes demanding their bloody joke, give this comedian a shake and set him right again, so he goes on as well, as he always does, but a bit lighter for it this time, with the rest of his confession resting not on deaf ears. "So I was scared."

Tim smiles softly up at him. "You could come find me in five hundred years, you fuckin' eejit."

He breaks out in a smile that hurts his cheeks, and that soft little thing on Tim's face just lights up into that grin once stopped him in his tracks and left him dumbfounded where he stood. "Even if you were fat."

"But how fat, darling?"

Tim lets go of his cheeks and holds his hands out to either side. "Three, four times your size. So I'd have to carry you round in a wheelbarrow, and we'd always have to buy out a whole row of seats, just to sit next to one another on the airplane."

"Well, now _that _sounds like true love, Timothy."

Tim loses that smile of his by gradual increments, and lies looking up at him, one arm slipping up behind his head, the other slithering over his chest, where it settles to nervously fiddle one of the buttons of his shirt. "Do you want me to say it?"

He swallows round the lump in his throat and ducks his head to aim his smile down at the hands he settles on Tim's hips as he sits up just slightly. "You can just go on looking at me like I'm the best thing you've ever seen. I think that would do it."

Tim snorts and lifts his hand from his button to drag it over his face, and when he's got down to his chin the snort has deepened itself into that great laugh straight from the belly, both of them shaking with it. "Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ," he breathes, lolling his head to one side and wiping the tears from his eyes as another round sets his shoulders to trembling.

He laughs helplessly along even if Tim's lost him a bit, and gives the boy a flick to the chin. "What?"

"Your face," Tim gasps, curling in just a bit on himself. "Your fuckin' self-inflated, shit-eating face. Have you ever suffered a moment of modesty in your whole fecking life?"

"I thought that was why you slept with me in the first place?"

"Right. I think you introduced yourself to me with a 'Hello; my name's Kol. I'm moderately skilled in the homosexual arts and my prick is of unexceptional size, but I have a decent idea of what to do with it, if you're feeling inclined toward trying another Mikaelson'. Went just like that, didn't it?"

He digs his fingers into Tim's hips and breathes exaggeratedly through his nose, kissing frantically from Tim's shoulder to his neck. "I just love it when you talk dirty to me. Say something else about pricks of unexceptional size."

Tim ducks his head to catch his lips as he makes his way across his chin, and tongues him roughly for a moment, till the exaggerated breath is a bit more genuine now, his cock stirring in his trousers. "I love pricks of unexceptional size," Tim breathes into his mouth, and twists his collar in his hand, till the air is nearly shut off entirely from him and the boy's face has taken on a pleasant black gauze. "I like to take them," he sucks his bottom lip and bites a few droplets of blood from it, "and put them in my luscious Irish mouth parts," he smothers a round of snickers with another thorough tonguing, "and just drag and drag on them until they spew their hot molten larva like a little wee snake vomiting death."

He has to shake Tim's hand loose from him now and lean back to get in a good belly laugh of his own, eyes smarting.

Tim points up at him. "You know what I did? The last couple of nights while you were out, I stocked up on those shitty bodice rippers, and I scanned 'em right fuckin' through, right? Five of them in two nights. I didn't want you getting the upper hand in shitty pillow talk, so I fecking devoured 'em, and let me tell you, Mikaelson, you're in for some right bleedin' treats." He nods and looks so tremendously pleased with himself that it sparks off another whole round of that sonorous laughter, the pitch of it scaling higher and higher up each wall, till the ceiling itself reverberates with this God-like rumbling of these hallowed four walls. "The 'hot larva' thing is an actual line. Came out of some woman's hot cave. Incidentally, I don't think I'll ever be straight again."

He leans forward to cage Tim's head with both of his arms, smiling down at him. "Why would you want to be?"

Their next kiss is a bit more serious, the spark of it catching on in a second between these accelerated hormones of the monster with his heightened sense of everything, and in a moment Tim's half-hard cock is nothing but fully committed to its cause, his own straining away at his zipper, so he reaches down for Tim's hands and he brings them up to slip them round his neck, and there's a moment of tentativeness in Tim's fingers as he tests the give of this vulnerable white curve, and then comes the rough squeeze and suddenly they are both off the bench and Tim has got him against the wall by the throat, pinning him there one-handed as he rips his belt open with the other, their lips busy at one another as he exhales his moans like death rattles while Tim's hand frees his cock.

Tim gives him a squeeze round the throat and he watches the ceiling of the confessional glaze over and the curtain grow itself a hemline of fuzz and then Tim begins to almost brutally jerk him off, till he is nearly on his knees with the pleasure of it, one hand clutching helplessly for Tim's shoulder, knotted with his exertions, both of them gasping, Tim's forehead sweaty against his own, his hips pistoning forward in rhythm with Tim's hand, his toes curling in his boots, the ceiling gaining another patch of black and the curtain with its nebulous hemline going spotty before his eyes, his rising orgasm gathering almost painfully-

"Tim- oh _shit_-" he wheezes, and Tim kisses him through it as his mouth opens with the shock of his release, following him down to his knees as the force of it makes water of his limbs, everything gone to pitch for one stark moment through which he reels dizzily, his ears ringing, his face buried in Tim's shoulder as Tim lets up on his throat at last and leans into him with one arm slung round his neck.

"Take your pants down," he says a little shakily when at last he can. "I'm going to fuck you against the wall until you pass out."

* * *

She leaves the window open when she works, to let in the smell of humans.

And in waft all these compilations of humanity, the sweet and sour of them, the fetid unsoaped homeless and the perfume like a weapon before girls who put their heels in warm gum and have no greater crisis than the scraping of it, and she's not gone, she still wants to be like them, bouncing along through her years checking for that first harbinger of age at the corner of each eye, but she listens to the warm life of them and to her own oddly fluttering unlife, and she just…

There's a pang.

She crossed the threshold of childhood and she emerged into the kingdom of monsters, and there was supposed to be an _in between_.

Have a husband and a mortgage and your one short stretch of mortal bliss, here in this great human ignorance where murder does not smell of lust.

They grow up so quickly, these little girls who will never grow old.

She taps her pen against her book, and leans back a little in the chair she has pulled up to the desk she made Klaus and Stefan move into her bedroom one night some incalculable weeks ago, bossing them through a dozen different positions as Klaus tried to hit on her and Stefan had to purse his laugh behind his tightly-flattened lips, until a barked order put an end to _that _particular crap, the freaking _incompetents_, and Klaus fired back with some expectedly bitchy comment about his status as the great and powerful Lord of the Douche.

But you see she got her desk exactly where she wanted it.

She smiles to think of it, and she glances at her phone, with his name already drawn up on the face of it, but Tyler weighs so _heavily_, she trails him behind her everywhere she goes, and so she taps the center button and blacks out the entire screen and she leans forward with a frown, burying herself once more in her book.

"What are you doing?" someone asks from the balcony, and she whips around, heart hammering, and she lets fly with her pen, and without losing his smirk, Kol darts out his hand to catch it half an inch from his crotch.

She stares at him for one stunned moment.

He tosses it into the air and catches it deftly. "Really? You couldn't have aimed for my eye?"

She swallows her stomach slowly back down from her throat. "I figured of all the squishy spots you can stick a pen, that's the best one. That's what my mom taught me."

"Your mother's a sadist."

"She's a cop."

He tosses the pen again. "I never did like those very much. They always try to ruin my fun. The uniforms are very nice, though. Well, on the young…taut ones."

"Should you really be here?" she demands, twisting around in her chair to glare at him.

He straddles the railing of the balcony and leans back on one hand, giving the pen another toss.

He catches it behind his back and smiles.

"I'll keep an ear out for Nik. Much as he likes his dramatic entrances, I doubt he opens your nights of agile headboard smacking by scaling your hotel and popping up on your balcony like a psychopathic Romeo."

"You mean like you're doing right now?"

He smiles again.

The pen makes another loop through the air. "What are you doing?" he asks again.

"I'm reading Tom Barry's _Guerrilla Days in Ireland_, and trying to translate the tactics into some kind of modern day strategy."

"Nik can tell you all that."

"I know that. I want to figure it out for myself. There's not always going to be a boy around to hold my hand. Or…behead my enemies." She crosses her arms and leans her spine into the table, giving him an assessing squint of her eyes. "You look happy."

"I got laid. Several times, actually."

She shakes her head just a little, sliding her hand up to bury it in the hair at the nape of her neck. "So…I don't want to say 'I told you so', but I told you Tim had changed his mind about wanting to…"

"Hide the Irish sausage?"

"Read the Bible." She ducks her head and smiles mischievously up at him through her eyelashes. "That's what I spent all of my very chaste formative years doing."

"You sound like a bit of a slut. I like that in a person."

"Takes one to know one."

"Oh, I'm a horrible strumpet. But as you can see, I'm relaxed, and I have the glow of the fair virginal maiden who always gets sacrificed to the dragon. Can't say the same about you, darling. Not knocking boots with my brother?"

"Yes, actually, we just did it twice. While you were watching."

He lounges back on his elbows, stretching one leg out along the railing, his shirt pulling tight across his chest, which, congratulations to Tim, is pretty nicely defined for a homicidal firebug with a really super assy smirk on par with his big brother's.

She's not _dead_, ok.

Not…not-alive.

Not sans a fully-functioning vagina with an eye for muscley man boobs.

What_ever_.

"You cut Nik up pretty regularly with that tongue, don't you?"

"Only when he deserves it."

"He always deserves it."

"True," she admits, arching an eyebrow and draping an arm over the back of her chair.

"What are they up to?" he asks, looking out over the railing and off into the city so that she can't see how much the answer means to him, his throat twitching just a bit above the collar of his shirt, his wrists jumping with the pulse he cannot quite calm.

"Well, your sister likes to just randomly show up and barge into my hotel room with an armful of shopping bags and then demand that I watch her model all three thousand of the new outfits she's bought and tell her how pretty she looks in all of them and how glad I am that I have someone of her impeccable taste to emulate, so instead of keeping an ear out for Klaus, you should probably actually be listening for her. I get the impression she's trying to steal me from Klaus, actually. Klaus I've barely seen for the last couple of weeks, and Elijah is creepy and we don't really talk."

Kol starts to laugh. "You're sleeping with Nik but Elijah is frightening?"

She throws her hands up in the air. "Well…I don't know. He's just…like, kind of quiet. And he _stares _at me, like he's-"

"Judging you? He does that to everyone."

"_Assessing _me. Like if I pair the wrong shoes with my outfit he'll eat me. At least Klaus telegraphs his murdery moments."

"Except for all those times he whips out his best polished English gentry smile and then casually pulls your intestines out through your mouth."

"Nope- I've got that covered too. If he's super polite, he's about to kill you. If he's super angry, he's about to kill you. If he makes a pun, it's a hint about how he's going to kill you. If he looks at me, it means he thinks I'm cute and is trying to decide whether he should sign off his diary as 'Mr. Caroline Forbes' or 'Mr. Caroline Forbes-Mikaelson'."

"Forbes-Mikaelson is too much of a mouthful. And not the good kind."

"I know. I'm gonna' push for 'Mr. Caroline Forbes'. Besides, you have to think of the children. 'Scarlett O'Hara-Hamilton-Kennedy-Butler-Forbes-Mikaelson is just not gonna' fly when I'm really pissed and have to use their full name. Speaking of which- Klaus needs a middle name. 'Klaus Mikaelson' is just not enough for some of his shittier moments."

"Proust," Kol suggests, and leans back on his elbow with such a smile.

"I'm guessing he had some kind of falling-out with him?"

"Never met him. Hated the shit out of him. Probably because Elijah thought his novel was 'positively genius' and Nik despises the positive reception of anything that isn't him. That, and he wrote his own novel and Elijah said he wouldn't wipe his ass with it if he were about to receive the Queen of England for tea and would have to suffer through all the usual dignitary niceties with his crack full of the shit still preferable to Nik's efforts. Well, he said it in his own Elijah way, but that was the gist of it. Did you know the first packaged toilet paper in the U.S. was produced by a man named Joseph Gayetty, who had his name printed on every sheet?"

She blinks. "Uh…no. But that's…interesting?"

He tilts his head and squints thoughtfully at her. "Would you want people to wipe their ass with your name?"

"I'd prefer they not wipe their ass with anything of mine. Can we change subjects, please?"

"Right," he says seriously. "On a scale of one to ten, one being unbelievable, and ten being 'Kol', what would you say my profile is, in the moonlight?" He turns his head helpfully back and forth.

She presses the laugh back down inside of her, and shakes her head. "What exactly are you doing here, Kol?"

* * *

He sees why Nik loves her.

Bit hard to not put your chin in your hands and give the stars in your eyes free run of your heart, when she laughs.

He thinks he'll be going soon, darling. Nik and Bekah have got their hands on you first, as they always snap up all the choicest bits, but he likes to think there was a little bit of sincerity in these moments.

So if-

If his story ends as always, with Nik not caring enough to work through this heap of old hurts accrued one on top of the other, as the centuries have stacked themselves-

He made his calls with a smile.

"Just wanted to check in on you. I was hoping you'd be naked," he says, and with a wink and a smile he swings his leg over the side of the balcony, and he drops straight to the pavement, to land with an instinctive flex of his knees, cracking his neck.

She's watching him over the railing, he can hear the creak of it beneath her, and the sigh of her breathing among the gusty bellows of this world that never falls silent with the immobile dark of a four a.m. morning for one such as him, but you don't look back at that, this too you shake off else it buries you, onward and forward, as nine centuries of making war upon time and death and love and all the things which will never thwart him permanently have taught him.

* * *

He stands over Sophie watching her breathe through her fitful slumber, his head cocked contemplatively.

In his hand her neck is such a small, small thing, and she starts up with a cry he squeezes to nothing, and for a moment they give one another that knowing glance of murdered and murderer, her feet drumming that last instinctive flailing of the victim, the sheets twisting beneath her, somewhere in his head the black satisfaction of imagining somewhere off in this sleepless city with all the noises of its life tapping always away at his window Caroline on her knees with a breathlessness she does not understand, crying out for God or mother or lover.

But none will save you.

Go on and stretch out your hand, love.

Feel that?

Nothing.

Yes, of course.

Nothing.

What else did you expect, for a monster's prayers to be answered, for the bloody _heavens _to cast wide their doors and hear the pleas of earth's abominations, for mother's soft bosom with the faint fog of her herbs in mute and welcoming presentation to the cheek which will never age beyond need of its comfort?

He presses Sophie back into her bed, straddling her as she sinks, his knees tight against the knobs of her hips, and to her chest goes his hand, have the heart out in a moment, love, don't worry, he'll be swift about it, a quick nip in and back out, you won't feel a thing, you won't feel a _thing_, Caroline, and isn't that more than can be _bloody _said for him-

But he lets up before his fingers have broken anything.

He lets up and staggers back as Sophie takes her first loud recovery rasp and he hasn't got a cheeky quip to his name, all of it stopped inside him with the abandonment of his brother, everything trembling as gods are not supposed to quake, the little shivers putting themselves all the way down to his gut with the seasick heaves that bring him almost to his knees, his forehead and his upper lip stippled with the damp of a man in his final throes, Sophie's frantic gasps not half so noisy as his own.

He has never let go of anything he can't have, Caroline.

And yet he slams the door.

Oh, sweetheart.

_Caroline_.

Of course he knew he could only hold on for so long, until came whatever inevitability to pry you away.

But he was hoping.

* * *

"Uhhh…1916. Yeah. That was just right before the Rising," Tim says, giving a squint to the photo in his hand and then taking a swig from the bottle sitting between them.

"Who are you with?"

"Kid named Sean McConnell. Horrible shithead. Just fucking- he was a cunt. One of the first casualties of that week, thank Christ."

He leans his head back against the wall and laughs. "And what did he fall to- a bullet or your pretty little mouth?"

"Oh, a bullet, yeah. Might have come out of me rifle, though. Tell you how hated he was- another fellow with me, Pat, he knew I'd done it, you can be fuckin' sure he did, and he just looked right the other way. Said it was a shame and all, with the old guns sometimes being a wee bit finicky like that, and discharging with nothing more than a little jostle." Tim takes another drink.

He smoothes his thumb over the edge of the photograph, Tim solemn in his kepi and his green trousers, the other lad turned from the camera, to show only his hairless young profile and the tuft of hair out the back of his own cap. "Were you in WWI?"

"Ah, no. Just spent me time kicking around Ireland all the way through the Civil War, kept on with the IRA after that, to Russia and France for a bit, then slipped down to Boston round about the 60s. Started running guns for the Winter Hill Gang."

He takes the bottle from Tim and smothers his laugh on the rim of it. "You're an awfully bad boy for such a nice, quiet young lad, Timothy. Little pissed, by the way, that Nik had me moldering in some coffin while you were off rubbing elbows with mobsters. What a load of shit that is."

Tim ducks his head with what's a rather adorably self-deprecating laugh. "Yeah, I was rather hot shit with those boys. Didn't say much, but I could shoot a man between the eyes from 300 yards off if I had to, without a shake in me hand. Fecking hunter brought a stop to all that in '67. He was hiding in the backseat of me car under some grocery crates full of pistols."

"Didn't you smell him?" he asks, tilting his head and giving the boy a squint of his eyes, the bourbon giving a noisy slosh in his otherwise empty stomach as he works his shoulders back into the wall, bottle dangling between his knees. He takes another long pull from it, and hands it back to Tim.

"Yeah." Tim drinks. "Picked him right up, but had one of those overconfident moments you get halfway through your first century or so, when you're finally settled into your own invincibility. Thought it was just some regular ol' fucker out to knife me. So I'm driving along the waterfront, thinking oh go on and give it a try, you cowardly bastard, and he pops up and he puts a gun to me head and makes it clear right quick that he's the thing stuffed full of wooden bullets. So I jerk the wheel hard as I fuckin' can, and the fecker slips, and off goes his gun, into the windshield and not me head, thankfully, and I try to elbow him in the cheek, but the fucker's a lot quicker than I expected, and stronger to boot, lucky me, and he's trying to shoot me again, so I just give the wheel another crank and put the pedal practically through the fuckin' floor, and off the side of the road we go, into the bay. Left him to drown and skipped town; wasn't sure if there were more where he came from."

He has got that first flush of drink in his cheeks, his chatter full of all his stripped inhibitions, something of a motor mouth is Tim, in those initial moments before the fifth or sixth round sets in and he's nothing for contribution but giggles light as a girl's.

He leaves off this tale with another drink, and makes a face. "This tastes like shit. Where the fuck did you get it?"

"It tastes fine to me. Maybe it's your face; there's something wrong with it that's interacting poorly with the flavor." He darts in blindingly and crushes his lips to Tim's, Tim crawling half into his lap in drunken enthusiasm, the kiss going a bit violent with teeth and the hold Tim has got on the collar of his shirt, till he sets the boy back with his hands on his cheeks and gives him his shittiest smile. "Definitely something wrong with your face."

"Fuck you, you drunken little shite," Tim says, nipping his shoulder roughly, and he prizes the bottle from Tim's fingers and he gets to his feet with it in his hand, knocking back a good draught.

"Let's go light something on fire."

"What about your 'insatiable meat wand'?"

"_Literally_?"

Tim gains his feet a bit unsteadily, laughing till he has to catch hold of his side. "I meant hormonally."

"Did you read another of those awful Fabio the Meat Stud novels, with the blowing hair and the chiseled abs, and the complete and utter disregard for anatomical feasibility?"

Tim grabs him roughly by the hips and kisses him hard enough to bruise. "I love it when you say things like 'anatomical feasibility'," he breathes with such an exaggerated smolder in his eyes they have to separate to laugh, Tim carrying on long after he's calmed, with the tears just rolling down his cheeks as he bends helplessly at the waist to wheeze out his mirth. "Oh God, oh _God_- she carries round his musty spunk rag and takes a good whiff of it every time she's to remind herself that their connection's all in her head and to prove his love-" He drops into a crouch and sinks his head down onto the arms he folds over his knees, just bloody hysterical, not a bit of him left out of this all-over quiver his laughter's put him into. "He rips off- he rips off all his fuckin' clothes and he fetches himself off till she- till she's finally bought the truth of their 'faerie fated connection', and then she tears off her own bleedin' gown, and she chases him down as he's trying to climb birthday feckin' naked out her window."

"What the _hell _are you on about, mate?" he asks, choking on his next drink, spraying the whole of it halfway across the room.

"This fuckin' book- oh fuck me," Tim gasps, and he crawls over to his bed and digs round under his pillow till out he comes with some cheap paperback with its hero well and properly sweat-oiled and stallion-maned, lobbing it to him with another burst of laughter that nearly does him in, till he has to fall backwards onto his bed, hands to his forehead. "Read what I've bookmarked."

He sets the bourbon on the nightstand beside the bed, and gives a theatric flap of his wrist, flipping the book open. "She sat on the side of her bed holding something in her hands. He identified the black and red cloth as a ladies' lace-trimmed handkerchief, but could not understand the evil that emerged from it to batter him across the pane of glass he peered through. She shook it out straight in front of her and stared at it intently, but without seeing it. It was then that he noticed the monogram and identified the "S" as belonging to Sorcha."

Tim sticks his fist in his mouth.

He gives a dramatic clear of his throat and reads on. "It brought back part of the night that nearly ended his future. The memory had either been obscured by the witch's potion, washed away in the alcohol he tried to drown himself in or simply erased as being too painful to handle. It was what he knew she saw so he forced himself to go back and stand beside her at the hedge leading into the garden. He was embedded in the witch, filling her with lust brewed by her black magic. Sorcha reached inside her bodice and drew out the cloth, this handkerchief. She bent down to where her body held his and swabbed the black fabric with the rancid refuse of their joinder. She'd tossed it to the ground at Heather's feet with a comment that it was all of Nial she'd ever have. He'd looked up as Heather bent to pick up the vile thing. As she straightened, the glint of moonlight had caught the fold of her eyes. Heather put the handkerchief to her nose and sniffed. Nial shouted "NO" at the top of his lungs as he opened and plunged through the window in a single motion."

Tim is crying again.

"Is she really-"

"Carrying round a handkerchief full of old love juice? Fuck me, she is," Tim gasps, wiping his eyes. "Flip forward a bit. Right after he rips off all his fuckin' clothes; start reading there. But do it in the voice of one of those really upbeat game show hosts."

He sniffs and gives a little stutter of a cough, priming his vocal cords with a quick scale that sends Tim into another round of those giggles.

"Buttons were beyond barbarians too, so he ripped at his pants and tore them in his eagerness to free the most beastly part of him!"

Tim turns over onto his stomach and buries his face in the bed.

"Turn back over, you little asshole. You'll miss the hand gestures that go along with it."

"I can't," Tim gasps into the covers, and so he flashes over to the bed and he flips Tim himself, then lets himself down onto the boy's hips, holding the book in one hand as he pins Tim's wrists over his head with the other.

"I'm just going to skip ahead to the really good parts, shall I…throws the handkerchief into the fire…prattles on about black magic and faerie banishment…here we are. He cupped his hands around the hard that rode his stomach, holding it out for her inspection! He watched as she surveyed his turgid arousal and awaited the moment when her anger and insecurity changed to desire! Let's see, quickening breath, nipples like rocks…He had summoned the woman! His need throbbed before her, open, unvarnished, and magnetically alluring! Is his cock usually varnished? Anyway, she can't look away, of course…As she watched, his hand moved up and down the organ he held, and a single drop of liquid desire emerged from the tip!"

He leans down and kisses Tim's neck. "She stared at the pearly drop," he kisses the other side of Tim's neck, "seeing male passion in pure undiluted form. It couldn't be imitated or produced at will." He tips himself forward till he's propped on an elbow, holding the book upright, and gives Tim a slow roll of his hips.

"Don't, you fucker. Don't be turnin' me on to this. I'll never be able to look myself in the eye again, if I pitch me trousers during it."

"She threw off her gown and ran to him. He had one leg outside the window and one inside when he felt her bare breasts at his back." He kisses Tim's throat and the underside of his chin. "Nial, I love you. Don't leave me! Don't go!" he hollers, and spasms his face as if in some great pain, flailing awkwardly away with his hips at Tim till the boy's hysterical again. "He turned but it was the beast that lunged for her!"

"Oh, get off me. Get off me, you shittin'- shitter," Tim demands through his gasps, and he flings the book away at last and lets up on Tim's wrists, smiling as he springs up off the bed.

"So do you want to go set something on fire?"

Tim gives him a pointed look. "Yeah, fuck- let's do it. Got something real specific in mind."

"Don't be like that, Timothy," he says, and then he takes a peek at one of the watches he pinched from Nik along with the coat he has left in a careless puddle on Tim's floor, gives it a loud snap, flicks it in a blurred circle with a whip of his wrist. "Actually, I've got a bit of business to attend for the moment. I'll see you in a bit?"

Tim sits up and dangles his hands between his knees, knocking his hat off his head to put one hand back through his hair. "Where are you off to?"

"Now, that I can't reveal. It's a bit better for all your internal organs if you don't know what I'm up to in my extracurricular time. Nik'll think you're caught up in it yourself if I start spilling all the juicy details. Nothing terribly interesting about it anyway. Mayhem, murder, magic- just the usual."

There's a bit of tension in the boy's shoulders as he carefully replaces his hat, tugging on the brim of it to settle it just so over his eyes. He's careful with his voice when he speaks, but not so his eyes, sharp enough to get the bile up in his throat. "I don't give a fuck what Klaus thinks."

He looks away with a strained smile and a scratch of his neck. "Everyone cares what Nik thinks, Tim. If you don't keep an eye to it, you get your heart ripped out."

"Maybe we shouldn't all spend our time tiptoeing round his fucking temper tantrums."

"You're the one who didn't want to leave with me because you knew he'd set out after us."

"And I said I regretted it, and I didn't want to base my life round his fucking wet nappy anymore. And I think you've spent enough time doing just exactly that." Tim stands with his hands in his pockets, the anger up in his cheeks, his forearms standing out nicely just below the muddle of his sleeve cuffs, rolled in the beginning stages of his happy inebriation.

He feels his own hot wash of anger, the prick of it in his throat and the curdling discomfort of his gut gone to froth, but he doesn't see a need to quarrel, not when he's already bricked himself into this new stage of death with his family obscured by an indifference solid as the partition of that mystical veil. "I'm going to forget you're trying to take a poke at my obvious manliness and your subtle implications about cowardice."

"That's not what I said."

"That's why I said you implied it." He keeps his eyes very steadily on Tim's. "Pass me my coat."

Tim throws it so hard the entire bundle of it unfurling in his arms would have carried a lesser man off his feet.

"I'm just fucking tired of him is all, Kol. And he'll give a tweak of the leash one day, I know he will, and off you'll go right back to him-"

"Just like you, isn't that right?" He wrestles the coat upright in his arms and shoves his arms through the sleeves. "Fucked him for three years, got yourself a nice round of sloppy seconds when he decided he didn't want you anymore, then saw him across a crowded street decades later, and went back for more. Despite everything you knew about him."

Tim runs a hand down his chin, and there's a real thunder on his brow now, his voice pinched as his eyes when he manages to grapple it at last from his throat. "Don't you fuckin' say that. You know that's not true."

"It's true you went back to him, and now you want to stand here and puff your chest and talk to me about striking out as your own man, and fuck the consequences."

"I'm sayin' to you that he's a fuckin' miserable cunt, is your brother, and I'm done jumpin' his bleedin' hoops all so I can get meself shot and strangled and hunted like a feckin' rat, all for doing just as he told me!" Tim snaps.

"_Well you can't quit_!" he screams, and for a moment they just stand in the wake of this, he panting, Tim wide-eyed. "You can't quit now, Tim," he says with more restraint, after a breath and a pinch of the bridge of his nose. "Nik will kill you. You said earlier you'd wait till he forgot about you-"

"He'll kill me while I'm waiting round for him to forget about me, at the rate he's going. I'm useful, but I'm not indispensable, Kol. No one is, for him. And I don't want to wait anymore, and you've been hanging round for nine whole _fucking _centuries, waitin' for this piece of shit to notice you just for your own goddamn self, Kol, and not because he's need of you, and Jesus Mary and fucking _Joseph _forbid you try to cut the bloody apron strings when he hasn't given his grand fuckin' highness' permission."

He stares at Tim for a long moment.

You spit in Nik's eye and you fire your cowboy bravado from the hip, and Nik takes these six smoking rounds to the chest and he tilts his head and he laughs at your insurrection, as he has always found the amusement in all such rebellions, and then round your heart go his indifferent fingers, and perhaps this time he will while away his grief for ten centuries, in that coffin to which Nik will surely banish him, and perhaps in a thousand years he will emerge purged at last of all his human failings with the pointiest of them bristling in his heart, but do you remember- you remember you wanted to _live_?

So in your bleakest moments you swung yourself from a rafter and you swallowed the cold black mouth of your revolver and in the April rain of an Ireland still clearing the fog of its revolution from streets shot to the first crumbles of creation you let the British execute you like a man- it was all of it just one long cry for help.

A man is always too young to die, with the world out there before him.

The silence has taken a chunk out of Tim's audacity, as silence always does, and he shifts round on his feet now and his lashes try to blink out the terror in his eyes, because what a long stretch of quiet from the youngest Mikaelson, and a decent man would give the boy a squeeze and a stroke of his hair and tell him don't worry, this love I bear you is not weaker than truth's offense, but he is not decent, he buried that a long time ago, next to the mother he didn't love enough to forsake her murderer, he is not _good_ Tim, and he is afraid.

So he says, "Do whatever you like, Tim. Get yourself killed. The funeral certainly won't put a snarl in traffic, after all."

And the look the boy gives him.

The years have put their dents in him, certainly.

But he was such a soft-souled thing, when once the decades counted down his breaths.

Rather like this boy he used to know.

Happy thing.

Used his smiles sometimes as a mask, but did not forget that joy is a worthwhile thing, and no man the less for celebration of it, by jest or laugh or tear.

"Well, go on and get out," Tim snaps, and turns his head to wipe his nose surreptitiously, with the slyness of a boy not about to get caught out crying on the playground. "And just- fuck off. You and your brother both. If I'd just never met the whole crazy fuckin' lot of you."

You're not wrong, Tim.

Here's cowardice for you: he can't stand to watch his own grief play itself out so sharply on Tim's face, so he just turns, and he leaves.

* * *

He lets the fecker get a good twenty minutes or so into his head start, just flinging himself moodily round his hotel and flipping the pages of his books idly like he's to get any reading done in this state, and then into his pocket with his revolver and the cap pressed down low round his ears, and out into the muggy evening where somewhere in this southern in-between of winter/summer the fuckin' eejit's goin' round with that coat and the great collar on it pulled up round his cheekbones to cook the looks right off him.

Spot him by the fuckin' shine of him, the gom.

The soldiers are nearly elbow to elbow, this side of town, so he is sure to smile politely and give the boyos a brisk nod, just passing through, no eye for any trouble, young thing like him with the look of the choir, and he hops up onto the sidewalk and idles along with his hands casually in his pockets, his thumb giving a lover's caress to the sights of the pistol, his eyes skinned for the tailored cut of that jacket with the hemline to the calves.

Nice bloody night. The clouds with their eyes shut up and not a hint of rain, though of course the sky weighs on him like some bleedin' inverted river blotting out God's domain. The fuckin' south. Don't know why he toils away in this broth, man like him with Ireland's cold mists all through him thick as the blood.

Better than the summers what bake a man primordial, drying all his fluids to dust, he supposes. Used to dunk his head in the sink for a good few minutes of paradise, in that Alexandrian flat he took up somewhere round '69, holding his breath longer than any man, just letting the water float the strands of his hair gently up off his neck.

Fecking beautiful, though, the old mosques like great Indian palaces, with the spires holding onto the last of the sun.

Oh, sure, then, is that really the kind of chatter he wants just circling and circling him till he's nearly forgot what's put the thickness in his throat- Alexandria with her blue hands giving their throttle to the neighbor's wicked eye and the sand in every crevice of him?

And those boys standing round with their guns and their slurs, and his new friend head of them all.

Right.

He gives a little tug to his collar, takes a corner, snaps his head round when some dark-haired fellow appears just ahead.

Down the next alley he pursues the fellow, then a glimpse of his profile and he's in a bit of a spot, the awkwardness between them heavy as a man, the blue eyes giving him the run-over and the smooth chin drawing up as the lips thin themselves disapprovingly, and his throat just stoppered with the voice caught somewhere helplessly below as he pockets his hands.

"Can I _help _you, bro?" the man snaps.

"Ah, no. Sorry. Thought you were someone else."

He turns on his heel and slips back out into the tourists, and sure and it's a fecking stupid undertaking anyway, with these twenty minutes long between them, and any manner of mischief and miles put away in that time, but, oh, he knows the bastard didn't mean it.

And it'll fester in him, with his family on the other side of the cannons, staring down their indifferent rifles.

But a scouring of the next several streets and he's got nothing for his troubles but some raucous drunks arguing their way into a titty bar, and so a sigh and a lowering of his heart and he plunks himself down on the roof of some old clunker parked down a quiet side street and he shakes out a fag for a good nervous smoke.

"Fuck me," he mumbles round it as his lighter gives a troublesome sputter and then reluctantly touches a bright tendril to the end of his fag.

He snaps it shut with a loud click and buries it once more in his vest pocket, exhaling a gray breath into the sky.

Well, now, give him a moment- the Monteleone is always a favorite old haunt, but he'd keep his nose clean of that, with his brother's same fondness for the old hotel, and the house, of course, won't find him within blocks of that, or anywhere's got a whiff of the whole lot of them-

He gives another puff and props his feet on the lip of the window, sinking his elbows onto his knees.

Stubborn shite bastard. Stayed just a moment longer and he might have taken a swing, but a good brawl always knocks the loneliness right out of a man.

* * *

The mayor's house looks very lovely tonight, with the moon draped very nicely about the roof.

No lights on.

All the hearts mired in that molasses of sleep, just ticking leisurely along.

He rips the wiring from the burglar alarm.

Do you know, darling-

He thinks he wants them to hear him coming.

He kicks the door open.

* * *

Crack of the guns somewhere up the road, and he smokes his fag nonchalantly into the warm New Orleans night and reaches with his free hand into the pocket of his trousers, to feel up the lump of his gun.

Prickle of life in his fingertips and his chest only when by the skin of his teeth he has escaped with it into the night, which ought to say a right Christ fecking thing about little Timothy O'Sullivan with the smile like dawn, as his ma used to say.

He hops down from the car and into the shine of winter making her escape from the sidewalks he taps the ash of his fag.

Leisurely does it, lad, with the hands in the pockets and the fag going from one cheek to the other, and a quick nip up to the buttons of his vest, to air the nerves from his clammy chest.

And now the guns dying off for a moment and then a whole new barrage banging round his hypersensitive head, and the city giving it right back with a howl to wake the sleepers in their caskets.

Shriek of a mother, that one.

You can always tell.

"Need some identification, sir," one of the men from the barricade up ahead of him barks, and for a moment he thinks of the license with the name not his own in the crook of his wallet, but with the blood up in him, is that any way to handle a mere three of them?

He lets off a great gray steam from the fag and shoots the man through the head, and with the second in easy reach of him, he stretches out his hand and he snaps the neck in a blink, then round to the front of him he hauls the fucker, to take the bullets of his leftover comrade.

Are you after emptying your whole magazine into the poor fucker, then? Get a tongue lashing like a fuckin' interrogation by the bloody Black and Tans for a waste like that, in the war.

He lets the soldier finish whatever it is he thinks he's accomplishing, and then into either kneecap he fires his revolver, and down the lad goes, howling all the way, his gun clattering on away down the street.

"Did a man come by this way? Few inches shorter then me," he hovers his hand round his chin, "brown hair, brown eyes? Wearin' a black coat to his calves?"

"I don't know; I don't know," the boy wheezes. "Oh God, oh fucking _God_-"

Ah, well. Thought he'd try.

Good lad, for giving it a go anyway.

He spits out his fag and ends the fellow's screams with a .45 between the eyes.

* * *

The mayor has a gun.

He'll shoot.

"Please do, darling," he says, and rips the bedroom door off the hinges to cast a slow judgmental look taught him by the best -such a lovely little cunt, his darling sister- over this man and his woman huddling in their bed, just soaked with fear.

The mayor opens fire.

He laughs.

He lets the woman make it through the doorway, shrieking all the way, but the man he kills on his bed, and what to use, he remembers thinking as he walked with heavy heart and his boots just lightly tripping along, he's in the mood for something a touch different, no less personal than the hands, of course, this is to be a dirty one, and so a quick pop round the kitchen for the most well-maintained of their implements and here he is, darling, he hopes you like it.

He hacks off the arms and legs as the man is still noisily conscious, no use in stabbing the gleam from his eyes before all that, of course not, there's no pleasure in butchering a corpse, too quiet, it's really the screams that make or break it, darling.

The children are crying downstairs.

He listens to them scamper into their mother's arms where she presses their heads softly to her breast and she breathes in her voice tightened by fear, shh, shh, it'll be all right, daddy's fine, and he remembers his own mother with her arms made of tenderness and sound sleep, to paraphrase one of Nik's favorites, and he cuts off their father's head.

"Marco!" he calls playfully down the stairs as the woman, quietly as she can, urges her children to their feet and herds them along in front of her, tiptoeing along with great care, her footsteps like landmines.

He runs his bloody hand along the banister as he descends, dragging his finger along the railing like he might caress a cherished cheek (he finds it really draws out the suspense), the knife drip drip dripping at his side, quite nice, just the right amount of atmosphere, Mother and her noisy offspring hiccupping out their fear in a huddle beneath the kitchen table.

"Marco!" he calls again. "You're supposed to say 'polo', darling. We can't play if you don't follow the rules."

She tiptoes toward the window with her children in tow, and he smiles as he listens to her wrench at the bloody thing, sticking as they always do in times of need such as this.

"Hello," he says from the entrance of the kitchen, and she screams before she even turns round.

He likes that sort of recognition; go on and take a peek at what's in his hand and all over his shirt and see if you can't do it again, darling.

Wonderful.

"Did you ever hear of Sergei Ryakhovsky? Probably not; not as mainstream as Ted Bundy or that Green River fellow. Anyway. I wanted to do something…" He rolls his wrist thoughtfully. "Artistic. Say what you want about those particular types of humans, but they were very creative."

He cracks his neck as the woman clutches her children about her.

"I called the police," she whispers, and he watches a bit of urine straggle down her leg, out the hem of her pajama bottoms.

"Lovely. Do you think they'd want to play?" he asks, spinning his knife. "Doubt it; professionals are terribly boring. I bet your husband was a real snore," he says, and at this use of past tense she shuts her eyes and she pulls her children in tighter, her mouth opening in that silent sob of the truly bereaved.

He tosses the knife to his other hand and spins it again. "Who wants to go first? Promise I'll leave the evisceration for the post-mortem part; I'm not a monster," he assures them all, and drops his fangs.

* * *

Nothing to show for his two hour tramp about the Quarter but half a pack of fags got down to the filter, so back to his hotel with him and his heavy shoulders, but wouldn't you bloody know it- fucker's sulking about on the end of his bed in the dark, head down, hands clasped between his knees.

He pockets his hands, heart just winging away into his throat.

Kol looks up at him, sneaking the glance from beneath his eyebrows, leaving his head down and his hands still tightly knotted. "I'm sorry for what I said earlier. I was a shit."

He drops his head to give his boots a good squint of the eyes, keeping his hands in his pockets. "What about you?" Kol asks him, and he darts a look up same as the one the little shit is still slipping him, covering up his smile with a tired rub of his hand along his jaw.

"What do you mean what about me?" he asks, rocking forward on his toes and lifting both his brows. "Do you mean for two hours was I wandering round looking for some bloody eejit fecking round in his winter coat on a shorty shorts and suntan lotion night?"

"It adds dramatic flair. Shorty shorts don't flair about your ankles while you're murdering on the go." Kol unlaces his hands and sits looking down at them for a moment. "Speaking of which. I left a bit of a mess that's really going to piss Nik off. It's probably best we leave off for a bit."

Well, he'll tell you what he thinks of that, Mikaelson.

He takes out his phone.

"Tim."

He gives it a squeeze with his hand, and the screen gives a great crack and fractures, the innards poking loose their little odds and ends here and there round the whole thing.

"Tim." Kol runs a thumb over the dimple in his chin. "Go back to Nik and tell him you dropped the bloody thing and you need another."

Away across the room it sails, into the far wall.

Back into his pocket goes his hand, with his friend just staring up at him, the strands of his bangs intruding a bit on his eyes, his hands back in their anxious knot.

"Come on, then. Round up me books, would you? I've got most of me clothes and weapons already packed up." He gives a little kick to the instep of Kol's boot. "You're not tearin' up the Quarter without me."

"He'll find us eventually. No matter what," Kol says quietly behind him as he sets to work gathering up his rucksack with its pockets bulged to the limits, giving the front a quick feel-up for his speed loaders.

"So you'd rather just be alone then? Until he comes for you with his dagger?" he asks, swinging round with the rucksack dragging down the right side of him, and his friend just sitting there on that bed, saying nothing, the shame of that pulling his eyes to his toes, and all the weight of this long and lonesome unlife just sagging everything that's yielding in a man.

Ah, he knows, you smooth fecker, trying to tuck everything away where it won't be noticed.

No shame in needing, you hear him? It wasn't anything was done to him, drove him to the noose or the bullet or that one afternoon tumble off the Cliffs of Moher and into the water that snatched the breath clean out of him soon as he came to.

It's not what man does, puts the despair in any ancient old chest.

It's what he stands alongside and he allows.

So let him not stand idly by, you hear? Let him not stew safely in his cowardice, imagining to himself all the things he surely would have done, by God, if he'd just been given the chance.

"Do you want the book with the shirtless man flipping his waist-length hair about, or the one with the shirtless man flipping his shoulder-length hair about?" Kol asks, and stands with his hands in his pockets.

And, oh, the smile this gives him, not that little lip service to the emotions, but just…fecking all of him, the lift of everything.

He grabs the back of Kol's neck and swoops in for a kiss he plants roughly on his forehead, and then he pulls back and he makes for the door with that rucksack banging his hip, walking backward as he points to his friend. "Both of them, of course. I haven't even read any of the second to you yet."

Kol throws it at him.

He blurs through the unzipping of his rucksack and catches it in the main pouch. Kol tosses the second from underneath his leg, and in on top of the first it goes, _Great Expectations _following with a discus spin, and on its heels his worn copy of _War and Peace _and _The Picture of Dorian Gray_, and now him darting about after them like a caddy rattling after balls, and Kol giving a little skip of a step and shot putting _The Brothers Karamazov _straight at him.

"Hey! Don't be doing that, you little shit! You'll take me fuckin' head off!" he protests, deflecting the book with his rucksack and catching it before it can hit the floor. Kol blurs up beside him, coat over his arm, and slings his free arm round his neck as he turns to open the door.

"All right," Kol says, surveying the hall with a slow turn of his head. "Let's break everything."

* * *

"A frantic 911 call brought authorities to Mayor Duncan's house late last night where investigators stumbled across a scene straight out of a horror movie," she hears from inside the house as she walks briskly up the sidewalk, curls bouncing, and a shattering of something breakable and she pauses, slipping her hands into her pockets. "-pinned to the wall with one of the posts from his bed and the quote "Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom" written beside him in what appears to be the mayor's own blood. The quote can be attributed to Marcel Proust and mirrored a similar quote, also by Proust, left on the floor of the kitchen where Mayor Duncan's slaughtered wife and children were discovered-"

"It's bloody _Kol_, Elijah, you know that!" Klaus screams, and then another crash and a slew of expletives she doesn't normally hear from him and suddenly the phone she has tucked into her inner jacket pocket begins to vibrate, buzzing against her ribs. Well what a nice coincidence, _unknown number_, you stupid _freaking _idiot, God there aren't _words_-

"What did you _do_?" she snaps into the phone as soon as she has blurred far enough down the sidewalk to be out of earshot, walking on like any old normal human out for a stroll now as she buries one hand in her curls, heels clicking purposefully. "Klaus is _apocalyptic_. He's going to kill you, Kol, and if Tim is anywhere near you right now and not heading for the house right this very instant so Klaus can see his super surprised face because what Kol's in town of course I didn't know that do I look like I have a literal _death wish_, he's going to rip his head off too, and I don't know if I can talk him down from that. I'm just cute, I'm not God, who, by the way, probably couldn't talk Klaus out of it either, because did I mention he's in full-blown _genocidal _mode right now?"

* * *

Nik is being an insufferable twat, so she sets out down the sidewalk in search of Caroline, studying her nails as she goes, when what a coincidence, dear brother.

It's been a while.

His voice is sieved through that annoying little buzzing of even the best of connections, a bit muted with distance, but of course she'd know any of them anywhere, even Nik with that one atrocious beard he grew somewhere round the 12th century because he decided it would make him positively menacing and he was still grasping round for the reputation he would need to build murder by horrific murder.

But do you know what she really enjoys?

The second participant of this conversation.

Quite interesting.

She cocks her head and smiles.

Oh, Caroline. What will she do with this?

* * *

Best place for an ambush, Kol tells him, so here he is, lying with his belly to the slates of some roof across the way, the Mikaelson manor angling up into the blue spring trying to nose her way into this March morning, Kol's bloody coat spread out over top of him, the fucker itching like a bloody fecking hooker's lousey cunt, his breath sketching out a thin cigar strand in the air has not yet had the day baked into it.

Check he's got his pistol to semi-auto, brace his feet against the shingles, screw down his eye so he's funneled all his vision down through that little circle, and don't you forget to breathe, you fucker, with the nerves going through you like the very plates of the earth themselves giving a great shrugging of their shoulders-

He wipes one of his hands down his trousers and returns his fingers to the stock.

Bloody prick going numb, squashed as it is for the last four bleedin' hours on this fecking roof.

Please Christ, by all that's holy, preserve his head and his boys.

Not sure which in the more danger, with everything down there with the touch of frostbite, and should he give a whisper to the lad, then, hiss over to him can he feel his whatsit, and should he be feeling the touch of concern?

He wets his lips.

Well don't laugh at him, now, but he can't feel a bleedin' _thing_, and of course nothing's permanent on a man like him, but what if he's stopped up the blood long enough the fecker's gone and died on him?

Kol's hip nudges his own and he takes another breath quiet as he can and he steadies his aim and adjusts himself best as he can and knows what he's up to, Kol does, because you can see the goddamned bastard tamping down his laughter, so into his ribs he pops a quick elbow and a quick flicker of the middle finger and he settles back down with the sights glued afresh to his eye, and now down the sidewalk they come.

Ways off, still.

But he hears them stamping along like those long ago soldiers he used to listen for, crouching in Mrs. O'Reilly's attic with the wet Irish winter all round him and the boys feeling it as he never did, shivering alongside him, pistols balanced on their thighs.

Kol gives his head a little bop with his own, and leaves it there.

He puts his eyes quickly over all three of the men, and sure enough they were all of them partners of his for one outing or another, varying degrees of useful, the one on the left a particularly competent little bitch, probably stepped in to take his place in these last few days of his absence.

Klaus will miss a minion like that.

God rest your undead soul, boyo, and may you rot in the deepest dregs of special hell for that night a few months back.

You know what he's talking about, you utter shitrag.

He opens fire as they reach the door, rattling off with his precise three round bursts into each of their backs, the brass kicking out over Kol's head to tink off the roof and the stock landing him a gentle nudge as he digs in with his boots, the walls of the neighborhood giving him back the echo of the shots and somewhere off in one of the houses a woman screaming and now a scent of blood on the air and the thundering of boots on the stairs inside the manor, and down he swings his barrel to tuck it along his side as he rolls to the side, right over the edge of the roof he reels, Kol half a heartbeat after him, and the door exploding open only a breath later, and the scent of that fucker mingling with the blood now, smells like unwashed ass, your aftershave, _mate_, and by God if he had the sack to say that to your face-

Kol shoulders aside a man out for a jog with his dog, one of those sturdy John Wayne types with his heart full of action heroes and none of the blood left in his wee little brain, all of it in his fists, for he reaches out a hand like a hammer and he catches him by the lapels of his coat to give him a great shake.

"Help! Call the police! I've got the little asshole!" he screams, and a knock to his jaw and down the man goes, spraying teeth everywhere, he hurtling the fellow as he falls, the coat snapping about behind him, Kol's fingers all tangled up in his sleeve now as he jerks them at a dead sprint for the busy intersection into which they burst, the few motorists not yet caught sight of his gun blasting away with their horns.

He ditches it on the sidewalk with a noisy rattle and follows Kol across the bonnet of a car has screeched itself to a dead halt in the street, leaps onto the roof of the next one over, and there now on the corner one of the NOPD's finest working himself up into a great lather, hollering and usnapping his holster as he runs, and traffic dividing all around them and going to their smushed ends into one another's backs, Kol skidding across another bonnet and touching down on the street as the copper lets loose with his Glock, putting three into his friend's chest before a casual shove of the man's face just bleedin' erupts him all over the sidewalk, his poor old head hits it that hard.

Kol shoulders his way through a crowd mostly parts for him aside from those few gawpers can't scrape their jaws off the ground long enough to let their instincts carry them off with a shriek, and through some little gift shop with the smelly lady's things fair choking them both they burst, overturning the stands with their little ribboned soaps, the sweat bristling all round the band of his cap and the collar of his coat and the tail of this bloody thing flaring out behind him as he takes a dive over the counter and rolls to his feet as the sirens begin their lamentations, the whole city just coming alive round them now, with the sharp perfume of the panic and the uniformed lads pounding away to their lorries, the hearts in them like rabbits.

Round the back of the shop and a quick pop up over a dumpster and onto the roof of the next building and they teeter-totter their way along, arms out for balance as they sprint along the thin spine of the roof, then a hop off the end and a hand to the air draws them both to a stop as Kol throws out his little feelers, centuries beyond his own, his brow with the little wrinkle that adds a year or three to his smooth young face.

He flips the collar of his coat nervously as he waits, popping himself onto his toes, giving a quick jerk of his hat.

Kol gives him a smile like to burst his heart right here on the spot.

Round his shoulder goes an arm and an exaggerated press of the lips to the side of his head just below his cap that he makes the fucker work for, leaning his neck far as it will go, scrunching up his face as the kiss is landed anyway, wet as you please, Kol chafing it into his cheek with his fingers.

"Go on and fuck yourself," he says amicably, but he keeps the arm around his neck as they amble off down the little back lane, and he lifts his arm to slide his fingers through the ones dangling down over his shoulder.

* * *

Tim seats himself next to the little red-haired one with her pint halfway to her lips. "Charise," he says in that soft accent sends the shivers right up his spine, and she gives him a side dart of her eyes and she sets down her pint and this one's no mindless automaton of Nik's, for she gauges the exit with another flicker of her eyes and brushes her fingers casually over a side pocket of her jacket with the interior reeking of steel and wood.

"Jesus Christ, Tim. Where the hell have you been?" she asks, and that's his cue, darling.

He wouldn't want to miss it.

He positions himself smiling at her elbow. "With me, darling."

And the look in her eyes.

But give her credit.

She fights Tim all the way into the alleyway behind the bar while he lingers for a moment to bash in the bartender's head before the man has reached the '1' in his sweaty emergency call, that big hand of Tim's just engulfing her mouth as he wrestles her through the back door.

Tim holds her while he twirls the leg of one of the bar stools, and oh, she kicks and she spits and she claws, the fiery little thing, and Tim breathing through his nose trying not to get himself all worked up as he always is by the fighters.

He stabs her once, not very deep, watches Tim's eyes flicker at the scent of blood, gives her another swipe, the girl aiming a boot for his testicles, Tim putting his back into it now as she twists and arches up and tries to put her elbow straight through his gut, and another stab and he smiles, he twirls the stool leg, he meets Tim's eyes over her shoulder.

Few veins under them now, and the flush in his cheeks, the lashes coming down to squeeze themselves a tight prayer, and then up again as she takes another thrust to the chest and tries to bite through Tim's hand.

"Oh for Christ's sake, finish her off," Tim says roughly, and if he had Nik's dimples, this is right about when he'd burrow them deep as they go, but he thinks his own smile will do quite nicely.

He angles the stool leg up into her heart.

Tim drops the girl into a dry gray pile at his feet.

He steps over her and gets his nails into Tim's back and his fangs in his neck, and the way the boy just _stiffens _against him, one hand going helplessly to the back of his head, his lips opening on a gasp he's not quite the breath to utter.

He shoves Tim back into the wall and bites into his carotid hard enough to spurt it halfway up his neck, Tim's fingers tearing the hair from the nape of his neck and his breath going sharp in his throat, his head just lazily lolling as he tries to turn his grip on that hair into a caress and has instead to gather it up once more in a clench rough enough to hurt quite deliciously.

Into the hole he has torn goes his tongue, and then he flicks it up over the lip of the wound and runs it along the line of blood Tim's already healing carotid has sprayed to the earlobe, giving it just enough of a prick with his fangs to draw another few spots of red.

He pulls away with a smile and saunters on back into the bar ahead of Tim, who has quite the flurry of abuse for him, the dirty-mouthed little thing.

Have to spank him for that.

* * *

"Who are we waiting for?" the tall blonde wants to know, and he folds his hands and he smiles, so patiently, quite kind of him, really, when you consider this inconsequential has no right to be poking about for anything.

"I've things to see to elsewhere, but there's a very important informant I need the two of you to keep your eyes skinned for. He ought to swing round here any time now, if his nerves haven't failed him. Just put your boots up, lads, and have yourselves a nice little rest."

He puts up the collar on his jacket when he exits the pub in which he leaves these little choice bits of meat, and down the road he saunters, smiling at the officers out for their patrols, hands to their pistols, and a squint for every man whiling away his final free moments as the clock ticks round toward curfew.

Good lads.

But a martyr for every cause, gentleman.

He thanks you for your sacrifice.

* * *

Breath up in Kol's throat, and the pair of them hammering all over with their nerves, cutting it close as they are.

He takes a swig of his coffee and ambles away down the street like all the dark nooks and crannies of it with the enemies lurking anywhere are his for the taking, putting into his step that authoritative swagger what gains every man with the issuance of his metal pecker snug in its holster, and beside him Kol gives a tweak to his stolen badge and brushes the lint from his sleeve, and into the bar they stroll.

Emptier than usual, with curfew tiptoeing round and round that minute hand and the soldiers waiting beyond to scare the revelry right out of the citizenship, but there's a couple in one corner and a few lads slouching over the bar with their eyes to the telly overhead, and the little blonde in the corner passing her swimming eyes over Kol and liking what she sees.

He gives her a right good fuck off with his eyes, and as one of the men on the far bar stools looks up and recognizes him, he flips the lid off his Starbucks and flicks the whole thing into his face, giving him a good dash of that hot brown piss right in the eyes while Kol bounces the man's companion off the edge of the bar.

The gal with her wandering eyes screams; Kol gives either man one to the chest with his Glock and on out the back they make themselves scarce as the noise of the left-behind takes up like a siren.

* * *

He kicks in the door.

Jack and Donovan facedown on the floor, the humans ricocheting about in chaos and the bounce all out of his bloody step now as he muscles his way through to the back door and shoulders it open to let the night air slap the smile right from his face.

"I will rip his _heart _out!" he screams, flinging the words in a circle as he spins, the night sky revolving round him and the alleyway blank in all directions, nothing but the rubbish fluttering away down the pavement. "_Do you hear me_, _Kol_? I will lick his life from my fingers as you watch, brother!" he shrieks away into the sky, and he wipes the spittle from his lips and back into the bar he goes, for a bit of therapeutic decapitation, until the whole floor is ankle-deep with his rage.

* * *

He wakes in the deepest part of the night, with the silence all round him like a funeral shroud and the bed empty, but above this top-floor room there's the weight of a man creaking the shingles with each shift of his cheek, and so out onto the balcony he ducks, giving himself an easy boost onto the roof and scrambling his way up the slope of it to his friend.

Kol holds up the cigarette he is smoking and gives it a good squint of his eyes. "These are shit, mate. You used to have good taste in smokes. What's wrong with cigars?"

"I see you've gone and smoked half the packet anyway, you shit."

Kol smiles round his fag.

He pockets his hands. "Any particular reason you're up here, then?"

"Just savoring my recent victory over Nik."

"Would have liked to see the look on his face," he says, and eases himself down onto the shingles soundlessly as he can, stretching out one leg and keeping the other upright for the arm he drapes over it.

Kol flicks some of the ash from his fag over the roof.

"I know he's your brother," he says softly, even with the pain like a knife in him.

"But he's a pile of shit; I've heard."

He scratches the back of his neck.

Kol takes another drag and away into the moonless night it goes, up and up till the wind has banished the whole long line of it.

"I meant I know he's your brother, so no hard feelings. For you, of course. I hope his prick falls off and Caroline leaves him, actually," he says, and laughs his way through the tightness in his chest.

Kol shakes another bit of ash onto the shingles.

"Well, now, you're going to find your way back to him one day. Don't be letting him shit all over you, hear? That's what I'd like to see. That's all I'd like to see."

He sees Kol sneak a glance at him out of the corner of his eye.

He lets his other leg down and leans back on his hands, their knees touching, the cigarette puffing away toward its death.

"No, it's done," Kol says, and he flicks the cigarette over the side of the roof and they both watch it spiral down to sputter for long moments against the pavement till the flame's got nothing left to eat and starves itself cold.

"You wouldn't be up here if it was."

Kol sniffs and flicks an itch from the side of his nose with his thumb. "Doesn't mean I'm not going to angst over it a bit. But I was mad at you because you were right, Tim. We circle back to Nik over and over again, all of us, no matter what he does, and we never fail to expect it to turn out differently. But I think 900 years of that shit is long enough. And Nik won't get over this. You don't betray him and walk away. So we'll see it through to its end, Nik and I. And I've decided it's my turn to win."

"And how will you do that?" he asks quietly.

Kol rubs his nose again, looking out over the edge of the roof. "I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm still deciding how much of a lesson he needs to learn." He smiles thinly.

So they sit in the cloudless darkness with their knees touching and the tragedy of the whole immortal mess of them moving through him and weighting all the bits of him that ought to fly free, him without the dogging of the clock pursuing his heels into fleeting nights, till his friend tells him, "I never wanted to be free of Nik. But he didn't understand that," and with a great swallow he replies, "Well, is it only your brother's love that matters to you, then?" and lets that just swell and swell between them.

For a very long time the silence stretches out and out between them.

"But why would you?" Kol asks him thickly, and he wonders how long it's been brewing in the poor fecker, spat out nearly at the end of his mother's childbearing years and lost between the cracks, all of them just rolling and rolling over him because there you are, then, he's smiling, sure and he'd say something if any of the jabs had made it through to the soft parts.

A man's laughter may build an empire but never a bridge.

He hunches forward over his knees.

"Why don't you ask yourself why wouldn't I?" he asks, rubbing his chin.

"I do have a very large cock," Kol says, and then he starts to sob.

* * *

Oh, Jesus, Nik.

He doesn't even know how to say good-bye.

Tim gets up on his knees and puts his arms round him with a hushed, "All right; all right, then; shh" and he means no offense, but for just a moment he wishes it were Bekah with the hair like his mother's.

"Shh, then. Shh," Tim tells him gently, and rocks him till he's got nothing left.

* * *

She still thinks about him sometimes, the man in the alley, with all his tiny years spread out beneath him and her just clutching that gun, and staring down at him and feeling in herself nothing little girls with mothers to be proud of them should feel.

_God_, the smell of him, the hot wet rush of his death, the prickling of her fangs and not horror, not _horror_, but the yearning hot and bottomless and everywhere.

And where does she _put _it.

Like.

A writer.

She comes home and she flails away at her keyboard, she puts everything she is, everything life has squeezed out of her into this keyboard and she keeps uprooting it all, she keeps pulling and pulling and _pulling _and maybe someone hears her between characters and maybe someone does not but it's _there_, she cut it out and she slapped it down still squirming and she will be forgiven, this weaver of stories with her fiction safely between reader and soul, but what about her?

What about _her_?

Can she ask that?

"Are you _listening_?" Rebekah snaps from across the table, and smacks the beignet out of her hand.

She jumps. "_Excuse _you! I can't believe you just did that!"

Rebekah rolls her eyes. "Oh, please, Caroline. Like abusing a pastry is the worst thing I've ever done."

"You can't just go around knocking people's _donuts _out of their hands because they're not paying attention to you! You are such a bitch sometimes."

Rebekah leans back in her chair and flicks her eyes out over the street, watching a soldier stroll his way up the sidewalk past them, glaring at everything.

She crosses her legs beneath the table.

"Hello!" she snaps. "You could at least apologize! And maybe, you know, go buy me another beignet."

"I could, but I'm not going to do either of those things."

"Well it's not like I expected you to. That would be considerate. I just thought I'd make the suggestion."

"You don't make suggestions, you give orders. And I don't take orders from people like you." Rebekah flashes her loftiest of smiles and takes a sip from the chai tea in front of her. "Anyway, as I was saying, Nik was just absolutely _unbearable _the other day. Do you know he _actually_-"

"I don't really care to listen to you bitch about Klaus right now."

"Then what good are you?" Rebekah demands, crossing her arms.

"Ok, just so you know, this isn't how you do the friend thing. You don't sit there, fire off a bunch of rants at someone's head, and never reciprocate by actually listening to their problems too. It's not all supposed to be about you, ok? That's not how it works."

Rebekah blinks. "I don't understand."

She rolls her eyes. "Fine. Drink your tea. Bitch about Klaus to your heart's content. I'll do the other bad friend thing where I sit here and pretend like I'm actually listening."

"You were already doing that. Besides, we're not friends."

She lifts an eyebrow. "Ok, then, not-friend. But then who's going to braid your hair while you're busy flashing your withered black soul for all to see by keeping up a running commentary all the way through A Walk To Remember?"

"Well, I don't see why I was supposed to root for that frumpy little thing."

"Because she had _cancer_."

Rebekah blinks again. "But her boyfriend had potato nose."

She jabs her finger into the space between them, lifting herself halfway off her chair with the vehemence of this, her voice scattering a group of children shoving one another in the street. "If you _ever _speak ill of Shane West again-"

"Relax, Caroline. It's not as if I don't already know you have horrid taste in men." Rebekah smiles sunnily, tipping up her chin to look down her nose.

She sits back with a shake of her head and makes a grab for Rebekah's tea that she is almost fast enough to land, and for a moment they wrestle for it, and there's a little smile out of them both as they slap away at one another's hands, and another as she sneaks a glance around for spectators and then blurs her fingers for the crumpled beignet in the middle of the table and launches a piece of it toward Rebekah's hair.

There's this nice sort of quiet between them, sometimes. To just kind of bask in someone's presence, to understand that they're soaking up yours as well, that sometimes words only have to be felt, that companionship should not be an obligation, that silences are not always to be filled-

She likes it.

She used to have it.

But that was a long time ago.

And sometimes she wonders-

Sometimes she wonders, did they lock these words away inside themselves to set an example, to keep all of it, God _so _much of it, pressed down inside her, to tell her with their little exasperated glances your problems are not welcome, for you there is no room?

"What do you have to talk about?" Rebekah asks after a long moment, not looking at her.

"What?"

"You said you're not supposed to fire off a bunch of rants at someone's head without reciprocating by listening to their problems as well."

She lowers her head and flashes her best Klaus smile, until Rebekah looks up at last to see it. "Are you making a friend pass at me?"

"_No_."

"I think you like me."

She gets the morning wood of all stony glares, it's that hard.

And then something dissolves in Rebekah's eyes and she looks down once more at the table, and her voice is a very small thing, for this most unbearable of all head bitches. "Don't you have something to tell me?"

She lets the tentative rain fill up the silence between them.

Your brother is here.

He loves you.

And it's such a big, big thing, all these years and deaths between you and still all of you clinging on with your fingernails, and getting in your jabs where they hurt most, in all the places you could have sworn no longer ached.

"Caroline?"

It's not her secret to tell, she knows.

But she overhears a lot.

Sometimes they forget her, tiptoeing along on the outskirts of them all.

So with Elijah patting Rebekah's back she sat in Klaus' empty office and she hugged her knees to her chest and she quietly wiped her cheeks because shh, shh, she knows.

She knows.

All the empty holes in you where there are supposed to be people. Elena to the left of her heart and Bonnie on the right and they were never going to be openings she had to stuff up or fall into.

She folds her hands on the table and looks down at them.

Rebekah stares at her.

The rain tap tap taps on the umbrella overhead.

"You could have trusted me not to tell Nik," Rebekah says, and the rain tap taps away and she plays with her fingers and she remembers how many times she was precisely here, looking in on a secret from where she has always been kept, on the fringes, and it's not her secret, it's not her _secret_, but she looks up and she licks her lips and she says, "Do you want to talk to him?"

And then they just sit there staring at one another, until Rebekah smiles, and it's like a stab, it goes all the way through, but she's lighter for it, if you can understand that.

* * *

So the next time that unidentified number flashes onto her screen she tears herself away from America's Next Top Model and she chucks the phone across her bed to Rebekah and she mutes the TV and she lifts herself onto her knees to bear the load of all this hope. "I think it's him," she whispers, and crosses her fingers.

And the bitch flashes her best privileged snot look and snaps, "Stop whispering you twit, he can't hear you", and thumbs the 'talk' button with such nonchalance it's so seriously obvious that everything comes down to this one moment, with the clock tick ticking on the wall and the pulse thump thumping in her wrists and outside the window all the length of the street drowned in fog.

"If this is Kol, speak now or forever lose your testicles."

* * *

He hangs up.

Tim looks up at him from the bed. "You going to go meet her?"

He gives the phone a little toss and pockets it with a flourish.

"Of course. You heard her. And when my sister makes a promise to keep your testicles in a jar for all eternity, she doesn't just wait round for you to call her bluff. Ask me sometime about the thirteenth century boyfriend who tried to rape her."

* * *

The fog slithers along after her as she walks among all the flotsam of humanity that inevitably begin to surface at this hour of the night, skulking about with their brutalities in their eyes, and their smiles to swallow such a little girl whole.

One of them has a knife.

She puts it through his eye and gives his head one good hard knock against the street light, and down he goes with his brains all about him, and his friend just screaming and screaming.

"Stop. You're shrill," she commands him, and he snaps his mouth shut hard enough to crack his teeth.

She smiles. "Please tell me you're actually wearing something clean," she says, and when he shakes his head with a spastic jerk, she sighs and she rolls her eyes skyward and she wonders why she hasn't eaten the whole lot of them, these stunted little things so far beneath her. "Did you wash your hair recently?"

He nods.

"I don't mean recently by poor people standards. Within the last six hours?"

He nods again.

"Do you have lice? Dandruff? Anything else you would expect from someone wearing Kmart hiking boots?"

He shakes his head.

She rips off his scalp, and wipes his friend distastefully from her hands.

Oh, what a nuisance he is, crying and shrieking and just carrying on about the whole thing as he feels about his skull for the little patches left behind, and then sending up a whole new wail when he brings his hands round to his face to watch the blood drip from his fingers, like the sight is anything novel for a man like him.

She doesn't put him out of his misery.

She wants her brother to hear her coming.

Men are to be managed, after all, and she knows all the little tricks.

He lounges so casually as he waits with his frightened heart to be loved.

She can hear him halfway down the block, his noisy pulse and his lungs busy at the cigar smoke he knows she hates and what she assumes must be the Irish twit, shifting around beside him.

She won't say it.

But if he could just hold her for a bit, so she knows it's not irretrievable.

Both boys come up off the wall where they have leaned themselves and hold themselves straight for her inspection, consciously or no, and she crosses her arms and passes her eyes over them both, lingering coldly on this stupid little interloper in his bloody hat, till he clears his throat and looks to Kol for help.

Her brother gives another draw on his cigar.

He blows the whole long stream of it into her face.

"Unless you want to eat your own penis, don't do that. Ever. Again."

He smiles that particularly menacing smile Nik has passed along down the years, and hands his cigar off to Tim, who takes a good drag on it and very carefully aims his exhale at his feet.

"Lovely to see you again, Bekah."

"Nik's going to kill you," she blurts out, and it's not at all what she meant to say, but she got only a peek of him when he stepped out from behind that veil, and here he is, here he _is_, Nik, with the bloody little dimple in his chin and the eyes like a bloody kicked dog's when you hurt him, and don't you remember what he looked like, peeping up from Mother's blanket, his hair still wet with his new existence, and that smile lit the own on your face as you went to a knee so she could bask in it too?

She lifts her chin and glances briefly at Tim. "And you. Whatever your name is."

"Don't be petty, Bekah, you know his name."

"I'm sure I've got it somewhere in the back of my mind. I just don't care."

Kol scratches at the back of his neck and leans back against the wall once more, angling a hip out, the ease just radiating off him, but she notices one of his hands steals to the boy's vest, to fiddle with the hem of it, and the glance between them in that language that is never to be understood by the likes of her, this dialect of lover and loved.

"Nik doesn't always get to win, Bekah."

"A thousand years says differently."

"You could help me."

"I'm not stupid," she snaps. "I've seen how your story ends. He'll kill your little boyfriend, dagger you, then in another four hundred years he might decide that maybe it's time to let you out, if he feels like it."

"Why don't you stop being his little lapdog for two seconds?"

And she knows then.

Nik is the only brother who needs her more.

You won't understand.

You will think it's about you, you will think there was imbued in these unbreakable three something you will never have.

And if she could fold you in her arms and she could stroke your hair and tell you of course not, she loves you fairly, it's not your lack but hers-

But she was never a mother.

She was never a mother.

But she'll watch you cut the cord and sail away just the same.

"If the two of you would just stop being so bloody-"

"Then the answer's 'no'?" he cuts in, shoving himself off the wall once more. "Show of hands?" he asks with that sharp brightness in his voice, and lifts his own. "Who saw that coming?"

"Kol."

"I think we're done here, Bekah. Please congratulate Caroline for having an even bigger mouth than me. That's quite impressive."

Tim stubs out his cigar and puts his hands awkwardly in his pockets, sneaking a glance up from underneath his cap.

"_Why don't you just come back_!" she screams at him. "That's what we wanted! That's bloody _it_, you little idiot!"

"It's _not_!" he roars right back, putting himself right in her face. "It's not, Bekah. That was what _I _wanted. Nik wept his crocodile tears, and maybe he even fooled himself, maybe he thought it was real, his grief, but the only thing that bothered him was not having me under his boot anymore."

"But I don't care about Nik. It was real for me."

"Then don't go back to the house. Turn your back on _him _for once. I'll make sure he doesn't hurt you. And you can do whatever you want. You can live outside his boundaries. He won't dagger you. I wasn't there last time, but I won't let him do it now. I won't. And all you have to do is make the same promise."

He puts a hand on either of her shoulders, tentatively, and he's so tender about it, her little brother with all the inexplicable softness the years forgot to take.

He wants so badly for her to love him more.

He never covered that up.

But somewhere out there is Nik with Mother still a hole inside him, and her with the hair just the same shade, he likes to tell her sometimes as he splashes away at his canvas, and he never won't need her, do you see?

Petting his wounds not because he deserves it but because if her womb did not birth him, neither did it nurture any others?

She looks up at him, and out of the corner of her eye she can see her answer all over the Irish boy's face, and the way he stares at Kol with all the tenderness of an elder, but it hasn't yet hit him, there is yet hope in his eyes because she hasn't left, she hasn't _left_, it's more than he expected, surely just once, just _once_, she watches him think.

He's so natty in his coat with the collar drawn up round his neck, her little brother.

She fixes the lay of it for him.

And then she wipes her nose and she walks away.

* * *

"Don't worry about it, Tim," he says when Bekah's footsteps have long died off. "It was always Nik who made me cry."

But the boy kisses him anyway, just where the collar of his coat ends, on that little strip of skin between jaw and jacket, and leaves his face pressed there for a very long moment.

* * *

She goes for some reason back to the girl's hotel, and she doesn't feel herself crying, perhaps it's too familiar a sensation, after all this time, but when the door opens and Caroline's own face crumples and she tears up for all these pains that are not her own she knows her grief has not yet let up, and she lets the girl grab her almost crushingly, and press them together until all the tears are squeezed out of them both.

Mother, she thinks when the girl has force-fed her three mugs of tea and curled up to sleep against her back, with the sheet pulled up round them both.

Why does she still need you?

You will say it is a very small, long-ago thing, but a mother's legacy does not shrink with her bones.

She pulls Caroline's limp arm over her waist and cries herself away into dreams.

* * *

He makes the witches come to him now.

He is a Mikaelson after all.

He wired a short into the light, so it flickers every so often, and plunges his face into shadow, making of his handsomeness a sort of villain's mask, the one half boy, the other shade, and with the bat sprawled over his shoulder, he thinks it makes for quite a nice picture.

Nik would be proud.

"We tracked down Caroline Forbes," Marie Allain tells him nervously, and he cocks his head.

She conjures up some fiery I am woman hear me roar I fell civilizations with my red sinner's lips and my black strumpet heels bravado, for she straightens her shoulders and meets him eye to eye, and he might be impressed, darling, if there weren't that little tremor in the neck, with its tell-tale flinching of the tendons.

"She's the best source of information we have. We're sending some of the wolves to raid her hotel tomorrow night. If we could capture her, interrogate her, then slip her right back into Klaus' network, compelled to keep an eye open and to feed back to us anything she sees- we could figure out where best to strike to bring your bother down. She's one of his few weaknesses, and the easiest to exploit."

He rolls his thumb over the handle of his bat.

"So you want me to compel her to spy on Nik."

Tim is studiously avoiding this little display, hat down, nose in his book, but he sees the little side look the man's giving him as he pretends _Moby Dick's _got the interest up in him, but let's be honest, darling, it's nothing but a vague breeding ground for all that homoerotic Queequeg/Ishmael fan fiction you're spinning away underneath that hat, because for what other reason does any reader stay -a trice-visited pontification on the skeletal integrity of every whale known and unknown to man?

He thinks not.

He rolls his thumb over the grip once more. "That would certainly piss Nik off, wouldn't it?"

The light sputters.

He smiles.

* * *

She makes it out of her chair and all the way across the room in the time it takes some invasive jerkwad to kick in the door, and a blur of her hand to their throat and she focuses her eyes out of this narrow battle lust and pauses half an inch away from the neck of a smiling Kol Mikaelson.

"Good evening, darling," he says, and boots her door clean off the hinges as it swings lazily back into his face.

"What the _hell _are you doing?" she demands as he just makes himself right freaking at home, strolling in like she didn't rightfully compel herself this suite for free.

Tim slinks into the doorway and pauses there awkwardly with his hands in his pockets.

Kol half-turns to gesture back at him. "Look at him- standing politely in the doorway with his eyes down so you've the time to dress if you're currently indisposed, like a real gentlemen- isn't that adorable? And me just waltzing in with no care for any of that, breaking things as I go." He knocks a vase off the table beside her sofa. "Where are my manners?"

"I was just wondering that myself. Stop touching my _stuff_."

"Don't worry about it- you're not coming back here anyway."

"What? And excuse you, but what if I _had _been naked?"

"I hate to disabuse you of the specialness of being my first, but I've seen a naked woman or two in my time, darling." He spins around, taking in the room as he revolves, his hands out to either side. "What do you want to take with you? Those books?" he asks, and from the table he scoops _Guerilla Days In Ireland _and the _Handbook For Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army_ and this almost-pristine copy of H.P. Lovecraft stories she swiped from Klaus' bookshelf when he wasn't looking, because _sue her_, it was just gathering dust anyway, and he lobs them across the room to Tim, who has ventured a careful step beyond the doorway. "Tim, be a good straight white boy and carry her books."

"What is going on?"

"You're clearing out. You've got a welcoming committee coming soon."

"_What_?"

"The witches have caught you, they're sending werewolves round to collect you, so take anything you can't afford to lose, go back to the house for a little while, till it all settles down, then find yourself a different hotel." He holds up a pair of panties she left drying on the TV, gives the waistband a playful snap, and slingshots them at Tim.

She's kind of gratified to see how quickly he gets out of the way, like there is contained in this flimsy little black scrap all the holy hell and brimstone of God Himself, and he comes up so _red_, and for just a moment she wonders what it must have taken, to have come through all these years and kills with that sort of bashfulness intact, and then Kol claps his hands and orders them all over the balcony, and Tim sidesteps her panties like they bite and vanishes into the bedroom.

"Why aren't we going out the front door? Are they already here?" she asks, following them both out onto the balcony where Kol has already swung a leg over the railing and has paused to flick his tongue at Tim, who fakes a swing at Kol's head with her books.

"No; it's just more dramatic this way. You don't escape out the front door, darling," he says, and motions Tim forward with a finger. "You better come and give me a kiss, Tim. It might be our last." He cuts his eyes toward her and smiles mischievously as he flicks them back to Tim.

"Oh, shut up, you fecking-"

Kol props his elbows on his leg and folds his hands into a knot, resting his chin on them and looking up with that innocent air of the attentive student, his smile not easing. "I'm listening. What did you want to say?"

Tim clears his throat and looks at her.

"What am I missing?"

"He wants to call me a cunt, but he won't do it in front of you," Kol tells her, and then he lifts his head from his hands and yanks Tim in by the collar of his shirt for a kiss Tim has to bend almost double to receive, and over the side of the railing he goes, Tim after him in a moment, she sighing and shutting the door behind them all.

"Do _not_ drop those books!" she yells down over the railing.

The boys look up at her.

Kol smiles and swats one of them from Tim's hand.

He catches it half an inch from the damp street and shoves Kol in front of an oncoming car he dodges with a laugh.

"Oh my _God_. If there were a button labeled 'absolutely do not push end of the world as we all know it your face will literally melt off like those Nazis in Indiana Jones' you would push it. Twice."

"Three times," Kol replies, throwing an arm around Tim's neck. "Just to make sure."

Somehow she herds them onto the sidewalk into something that might be called a line if you tip your head to one side and maybe squint your eyes really hard and you 're blind and one head injury shy of those homes that Jeremy used to call Raisin Farms, and maybe it annoys her just a _teensy _bit, ok, to be jostled about by their antics until she has to fall back just a little, to walk on alone with her unruffled clothes and her neatly-ordered hair, but they're happy.

So she walks along behind them through the lamplight and the fog, and she smiles.

Kol leads them a good half a block with Tim's head under his arm, snatching his hat away to ruffle his hair as he walks him in this headlock toward the empty intersection ahead, Tim getting in a few good hits to his ribs, until he is let up and a shoving match breaks out, and her watching those books with little helpless snaps of her hands into the wet night as Tim careens into a wall and they tilt tilt tilt tilt-

She sees both of their heads jerk around a split second before she hears the breathing and the footsteps and along on this wave of sound the scent of the nerves at their throats and their scalp lines, the fog giving rise to these little far-off patches which do not quite blend, and the boys parting now to prepare for their moment, as boys always do.

Kol cracks his neck.

Tim takes out his revolver and spins the chamber.

And then out of the fog four more people who will never go home, Tim lifting his arm to shoot the first between the eyes and Kol ducking casually under this arm to clothesline the second onto his back, the third fumbling his gun out into the night just in time for Kol to rip off his hand at the wrist, and she doesn't want to tell you what his screams do to her, the way they twist and twist inside her in all the wrong ways, and the hot spray of this stump across Tim's cheek and the way Kol licks this off so _casually_, and she doesn't vomit.

She doesn't vomit at all.

Tim shoots the fourth.

"Caroline," the boys call out in unison, half a second before she smells the gun and she hears the heave of his nervous young stomach fresh to war, and she spins to slap the pistol out of his hand and back him by the collar of his shirt into the wall of the nearest building.

"Rip out his heart and catch up with us, darling," Kol tells her, and continues on just as nonchalantly as any human out for his midnight stroll in the mist of this gray evening.

"Please," the kid whispers, and this close she smells the bile on his breath, and the detergent on his shirt, and all the myriad little scents he has picked up as he has wandered through this life she is about to end, bar smoke and pumpkin latte and the fragile white snowfall of his last beignet, and everything in her yearning, _yearning_, so far past her compassion, and oh, Mom.

_Mom_.

Everything you never wanted for your little girl.

"Give him a pop to the back of the head, if it's too hard the other way," Tim says quietly from behind her, and she half-turns with the kid's shirt still in her hand, to see that he never did wander off with Kol, that he's holding out his revolver handle-first, her books still tucked under his arm, his eyes soft with his understanding.

She stares at him.

The boy is breathing louder than them both.

She listens to his life rattling away in his chest.

The fog touches her shoulders and settles over her and if she were a girl, if she were just a girl, she would feel the chill of this in her bones and in the fingers strangled to frostbite in the collar of this boy who breathes, who breathes again, who wants her to let him go, please God, please _God_, he says, he didn't know.

He didn't know.

She woke in a hospital with her aching gums and her lungs still stirring from that primordial sleep of the recently-dead, who are not supposed to shake off the cobwebs of this long black forever and watch the little girls in their mirrors smear blood from their teeth, and she didn't know either.

Here's how it is.

She tells Tim no, she's got this, and she shoves her hand into the boy's chest up to her elbow.

* * *

Caroline walks through his front door with three books under her arm and the mist still in her hair, and what he wants most of all is to not be struck by this.

But she sits him up a little straighter in his chair anyway.

He swirls the whiskey in his glass and sips it with barely a look in her direction, letting his knees loll a little wider, his head sagging back against the rest, his lashes coming down to shutter his eyes, to view her as she should be examined, with this lazy half-gaze of the unattached, and now she pauses in the doorway of this study he has commandeered while Elijah is off who the bloody hell knows where, the fire spitting behind its grate and the books with their silent years pressed flat between the pages, looking on as nothing else ever will, with cold flat insouciance.

Perhaps he'll build an entire house out of the things.

"Hi," she says, a bit tentatively, rolling her bottom lip between her teeth, and he takes another drink.

He lets the silence stretch until she is tense with it.

"What are you doing here?" he asks at last, directing his attention precisely where she deserves it, everywhere but her.

"My hotel got raided by some werewolves, so I headed over here. I thought I could stay the night, keep off the streets until things had kind of settled, then go move my things to one of the other safe houses. The Hilton on St. Charles is a bust now. So. Don't…send anyone else there."

She keeps between them this careful distance he worked so hard to make her cross.

He swishes the whiskey in his glass. "Bekah's not here."

She sets down her books on one of the end tables and behind her back go her hands, and now this little careful side step with her head down and her lashes coyly going, and the smile she knows cracks the rust from his heart. "Well, there's probably someone else here that I could hang out with for a while."

He runs a hand over his stubble and looks down.

"Klaus," she says, and he listens to the slight stick of this in her throat, and he does not look up.

"Well, you've just missed Stefan. He was round here half an hour or so ago, looking for you. I'm sure you can catch up with him."

"So…you don't want me to stay?"

"Not particularly, sweetheart."

And because his reputation has long since murdered his heart, he cannot tell you to what he is reduced, watching this stick itself in every part of you some bloody fools saw not fit to love.

"Ok," she says quietly. "But _why_?"

And his legs with their new independence lift him from his chair and his feet carry him onward and he doesn't so much hold her as fall on her, a creature of his breadth, can you imagine, and the girl bearing him gamely, as she bears all things, and his brother, Caroline, his _brother _out there come round at last to his hate-

She kisses the side of his head, and he can't be mistaken, the tenderness in it, he has witnessed it far more than he has partaken in it, but it's genuine, of course it is, of course her hand smoothes his cheek because she is similarly overcome, and the breath he kisses out of her- it comes up short because what lungs can process a moment like this, what heart would stall out of pity, Caroline, is he not right?

Isn't he?

She holds his cheeks in both hands, and away across them go her thumbs, and her smile just lighting bloody everything.

He kisses her with his hand round the back of her neck, not crushing but lightly as he has ever held anything, just cradling it, and willing her back to him as his brother will not be wooed, with every cold and powered ounce of him squeezed dry by the years but somehow still breathing, still breathing, Caroline.

He has always let his hatred win.

And then she waltzes-

She waltzes in here with her bloody smile and she thwarts him at every turn, and he holds her neck in his hand and he can't even squeeze.

If man's soul is one great theatre of war for however many years he sucks in all the world and he lets it back out, to the one side the charge of the conscience, to the other the swords of the beast that makes for himself a home in the pits of the kindliest men, he has long since grown tired of this struggle and to the only victor pitched his lot.

But she twists the knife in his back, little Caroline with her secret rendezvous and her false declarations, and she smiles like she can't help it, flush against him as she is, and he can only shut his eyes, and breathe against her neck, and down his back one of her hands trails, until he is shuddery with it, and his arms not tightening to snap her, but to keep her.

* * *

He doesn't say anything.

He lowers her to the floor and he pulls off her jeans carefully, one leg at a time, and he trails his lips all the way from her ankle to her thigh like he is not so much kissing as deifying her, but he doesn't say anything.

She strokes the curls at the nape of his neck and when he slips into her she lifts his head by them and kisses him with her thumbs pressed into his cheekbones, not opening her mouth but just breathing into his, his hands sliding up into her hair and along her cheeks and then feeling along her sides and around her back and pulling them chest to chest until they are so close he can only slide each of his slow thrusts a short inch at a time into her, his eyes shut.

She skims her fingers along his lower back and ghosts them over his hips and up his spine, now, raising the skin there in little bumps as she explores all the way up to his shoulders and the slight anomaly of his tattoo, stroking the edges of it, his breath going thin in his throat as he props himself on his hands and hovers over her now, just looking, and everything in his eyes exactly how she always wanted to be loved.

He comes with a ragged exhale against her throat, turns his head to rest his cheek on her shoulder, his nose pressed against her neck, and now he slides his hand down between them, still inside her, his orgasm trickling down her thigh, his breath still with that sharp edge of exertion, and he runs his thumb over her clit, not moving his hips, just circling a finger over and over her, pressing down and working his fingers back and forth until she is shaking with the sensation, her legs trembling around his waist, her toes curling, that jittery wet heat just building and building, her hand coming up to clutch the back of his head, her calves working themselves a little higher up his back, her heart hammering, her throat tight, all the breath in her lungs just squeezing and squeezing itself up this narrow space to slide out roughly between her lips, almost a cry, and Klaus suddenly lifting himself from the crook of her neck to kiss the breath right back down inside her, until she is wheezing with it, both their mouths frantic, his hips suddenly joining the fray to push her back and back and back into the carpet-

"Caroline," he says breathlessly, his voice strained or breaking or both, and he gets a hand under her thigh and pulls her leg up his back until he hits a whole new angle, and she cries out with the first small ripple, muffles it against his lips, drops her head back to pant her way through the rest, coming and coming again as he frames her face with his rough hands and feels carefully along her cheeks with his thumbs, giving her the final few thrusts she needs to bring her all the way through, his necklaces jingling.

He props himself on his elbows when she has gone still and boneless beneath him at last, sending his shaking fingers up over her forehead and back into her hair, and she smiles at him, and he wants it to not mean anything, she knows.

It hurts so badly, when they don't carry through.

How many times how many boys how many _friends _have made her this one unspoken promise, and she pitching herself headfirst into their attention that never lasts and breaking something new when she reaches the bottom?

But he smiles back.

And she's not like the others.

She's not like the others.

No take backs Forbes.

That's always been her problem, you see.

* * *

**A/N: One more part to go, and then we're done with this fic, and it's on to the eleventh in the series. Caroline has big things coming up in the next part, we'll see more of how Tyler's presence in New Orleans affects her, and we'll finally get that flashback, which will feature Rebekah and Kol. Also, more Team Barbie. And, as you've probably guessed, Kol and Klaus are heading for an ugly showdown.**

**The book Kol is reading from, in which a woman carries around a rag full of dried splooge that she regularly sniffs and fondles to keep herself grounded when love attempts to carry her away, is indeed real. _A Faerie Fated Forever _by Mary Anne Graham, possibly the most bizarre book you'll ever read. The 'hot larva' (no, that's not a typo I made) gushing out of some woman's 'hot cave' is also a reference from an actual book, although unfortunately enough I can remember neither the quote nor the book itself.**

_**Teleny **_**is indeed a very gay, very explicit 19th century porn attributed to Oscar Wilde, although many suspect it was actually written in round Robin style and passed around a group of his friends and colleagues, and that he either had little or nothing to do with it. I have the complete collection of his works, and having never heard of this novella before, I eagerly jumped right into it, having no idea what it was about.**

**Imagine my surprise. "Well, hey, that homo-erotic subtext seems a little less...subtexty than usual.' (A warning, if curiosity compels you to seek out this book. There's a pretty graphic rape scene in it, and at one point, A MAN IS ASS FUCKED WITH A BOTTLE AND THE WHOLE TIME I SAT THERE READING THIS I'M LIKE INTERNALLY SCREAMING BECAUSE NO BRO YOU DON'T PUT GLASS IN YOUR ASSHOLE NOTHING GOOD CAN COME FROM THAT AND GUESS WHAT NOTHING GOOD CAME FROM THAT.)**

**Thank you for reading, you glorious motherfuckers, and till next time.**


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